Won't you be my neighbor?

For many, the boisterous choruses of frogs are often a sign that spring has finally arrived. In a single, small wetland, hundreds of males may be found calling. For frogs, these calls function to attract females and warn off rival males. However, they may also inadvertently serve as location cues, alerting and attracting conspecifics to the presence of suitable breeding habitat and aggregations. As evident from this image of Western Chorus frogs calling from an ephemeral wetland, where this is one frog, there is often many. For frogs that breed in spatially and temporally unpredictable waters, such as ephemeral wetlands, orienting towards conspecific calls may save precious time and energy otherwise spent searching for these resources. Currently, little is known about the importance of frog calls in influencing conspecific attraction. My research investigates the role of frog calls and choruses in facilitating conspecific attraction and location of breeding habitat, and how the use of conspecific attraction may be dependent on species breeding ecology. If frogs use conspecific calls to locate breeding habitat, the potential exists for managers to use playbacks of a target species to attract frogs to newly created or restored wetlands.Ope