ABSTRACT
Males in numerous animal species use mating songs to attract females and intimidate competitors. We demonstrate that modulations in song amplitude are behaviourally relevant in the fruit fly Drosophila. We show that Drosophila melanogaster females prefer amplitude modulations that are typical of melanogaster song over other modulations, which suggests that amplitude modulations are processed auditorily by D. melanogaster. Our work demonstrates that receivers can decode messages in amplitude modulations, complementing the recent finding that male flies actively control song amplitude. To describe amplitude modulations, we propose the concept of song amplitude structure (SAS) and discuss similarities and differences to amplitude modulation with distance (AMD).
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Footnotes
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing or financial interests.
Author contributions
Conceptualization: B.B.; Methodology: B.B.; Software: B.B.; Mathematical modeling and interpretation: B.B., M.A.P.; Validation: B.B.; Formal analysis: B.B.; Resources: S.F.G.; Data curation: B.B.; Writing – original draft: B.B.; Writing – review & editing: B.B., M.A.P., J.O.V., S.F.G.; Visualization: B.B.; Supervision and mentoring: M.A.P., S.F.G.; Project administration: B.B.; Funding acquisition: B.B., S.F.G.; Interpretation of results and analysis: B.B., M.A.P., J.O.V., S.F.G.
Funding
This research was supported by the Wellcome Trust [099751/Z/12/Z, 106189/Z/14/Z].
Data availability
Data on fly copulation and the code that we used for analysing these data (https://figshare.com/s/a6535e5fc86ba4d74d9b), amplitude-gain-analysis scripts (in Matlab) (https://figshare.com/s/d42b0cfe865011e5be0906ec4bbcf141), and Matlab code for generating playback stimuli from Drosophila audio tracks (https://figshare.com/s/fb5f8110865011e5b0ef06ec4b8d1f61) are available on Figshare.
- Received December 16, 2017.
- Accepted April 9, 2018.
- © 2018. Published by The Company of Biologists Ltd
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium provided that the original work is properly attributed.
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