Associate Professor University of Denver Denver, Colorado
The diversity of signaling traits within and across taxa is vast and striking, prompting us to consider how novelty evolves in the context of animal communication. New communication features could first arise in signalers or receivers, but the microevolutionary processes that result in novel signal or receiver traits remain relatively unknown because observing the contemporary evolution of new traits is so very rare. Further, how new sexual signals, the focus of this talk, arise, persist, and spread is difficult to envision because signals and receiver responses frequently coevolve, and new signal features could disrupt existing communication systems. How then do novel sexual signals come to be? In this talk I will highlight recent work demonstrating how opposing selection pressures and the decoupling of form and function facilitated the evolution of new male mating songs in introduced island populations of a field cricket.