This award, in honor of one of the founders of the Animal Behavior Society, is for the best poster at the annual meeting. These small, diurnal, semi-terrestrial and aposematically colored frogs are mostly free of predation as adults, which has allowed them to cluster around limiting resources, and evolve a complex social system. For this, my dissertation work, I set out to explore the social and reproductive behavior of this little known species. 925 hours of observations were conducted on marked animals over the course of two wet seasons in Northeastern Madagascar. Several behaviors, some of which are stereotyped and largely invariable, but most of which are context-dependent, were discovered.
Males emit loud, double-note advertisement calls from elevated perches in their territories.
When a female approaches a calling male, his vocalizations drop in volume as he approaches her, and he places his throat on the top of the female's head or dorsum. The male then leads the female to a potential oviposition site. Females often reject oviposition sites, at which point the stereotyped chinning and leading behavior resumes. Successful courtships result in a single egg being laid above the water line. This is the lowest known clutch size for an anuran without direct development, and is suggestive of a high degree of parental care.