DOI: 10.5061/dryad.dr4j0
title: Data from: Spatio-temporal dynamics of field cricket calling behaviour: implications for female mate search and mate choice

description: Amount of calling activity (calling effort) is a strong determinant of
 male mating success in species such as orthopterans and anurans that use
 acoustic communication in the context of mating behaviour. While many
 studies in crickets have investigated the determinants of calling effort,
 patterns of variability in male calling effort in natural choruses remain
 largely unexplored. Within-individual variability in calling activity
 across multiple nights of calling can influence female mate search and
 mate choice strategies. Moreover, calling site fidelity across multiple
 nights of calling can also affect the female mate sampling strategy. We
 therefore investigated the spatio-temporal dynamics of acoustic signaling
 behaviour in a wild population of the field cricket species Plebeiogryllus
 guttiventris. We first studied the consistency of calling activity by
 quantifying variation in male calling effort across multiple nights of
 calling using repeatability analysis. Callers were inconsistent in their
 calling effort across nights and did not optimize nightly calling effort
 to increase their total number of nights spent calling. We also estimated
 calling site fidelity of males across multiple nights by quantifying
 movement of callers. Callers frequently changed their calling sites across
 calling nights with substantial displacement but without any significant
 directionality. Finally, we investigated trade-offs between within-night
 calling effort and energetically expensive calling song features such as
 call intensity and chirp rate. Calling effort was not correlated with any
 of the calling song features, suggesting that energetically expensive song
 features do not constrain male calling effort. The two key features of
 signaling behaviour, calling effort and call intensity, which determine
 the duration and spatial coverage of the sexual signal, are therefore
 uncorrelated and function independently.
description: Low-Resolution Calling
 Effort ScansLow-resolution calling
 effort scans for 31 nights (individual files). The first column refers to
 the unique 3-letter colour codes of individuals followed by the time at
 which the individuals were first sighted (2nd column). The next set of
 columns, except the last two, represent the calling activity marked in
 binary (1 for calling and 0 for non-calling), with headings indicating the
 start of scan sampling. The final two columns represent the distance (r)
 and angle (theta) of the calling site from a given reference
 point.High-Resolution_CallingEffortHigh resolution calling effort scans of individuals. The first row contains the individual ID (unique 3-colour codes). The second row refers to the night number corresponding to the low-resolution scans(hence the file number). '0' means that those individuals were found outside of the 31 nights when low-resolution scan sampling was conducted. The third row depicts the Sound Pressure Level (SPL). The fourth row contains the starting time of high-resolution calling effort sampling. The following rows contain the calling effort data coded in binary.CallingSongFeatures5-syllable chirp duration, 5-syllable chirp period and number of 2-syllable chirps of the P.guttiventris calling song recorded from different individuals.