ABSTRACT
My goal is to review acoustic pattern recognition in anuran amphibians. The majority of behavioral studies have exploited natural responses to sounds, and frogs and toads of both sexes usually responded selectively. Playback experi ments using synthetic signals have demonstrated that frogs, especially females, can discriminate among acoustic patterns that differ in very subtle ways. This is hardly surprising in view of their natural history. Frogs must often recognize and localize other individuals of the same species against a background generated by many other individuals of the same and of different species. Moreover, the signals of several pairs of species are similar enough to elicit appropriate re sponses by individuals of both species (Gerhardt, 1982), so that even species recognition is usually not merely a function of audibility.
