TY - JOUR T1 - Exploring efficiency landscapes in the acoustic-morphospace of crickets reveals two alternative calling strategies JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/2022.11.13.516353 SP - 2022.11.13.516353 AU - Erin E. Brandt AU - Sarah Duke AU - Honglin Wang AU - Natasha Mhatre Y1 - 2022/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2022/11/23/2022.11.13.516353.abstract N2 - Male crickets attract females by rubbing forewings together to produce calls. Louder calls are more effective, as they travel further, and attract more mates. However, crickets are small and produce calls inefficiently. Tree crickets make baffles, which reduce acoustic short-circuiting and increase efficiency. Previous work showed that tree cricket baffles function optimally (Mhatre et al., 2017). Here, we ask why baffle use is uncommon in crickets despite its advantages. We hypothesize that baffling may be rare because it is advantageous only for certain species. To test this, we modelled the calling efficiencies of cricket wings within their acoustic-morphospace (ie: the complete space of natural wing sizes and call frequency range). Using finite and boundary element analysis we calculated cricket acoustic efficiency in multiple of acoustic environments, incorporating both reflective and scattering surfaces like the ground and vegetation into our analyses. Within the efficiency landscapes generated from these data, we plotted the positions of 111 species across 7 phylogenetic clades. Using landscape and clade level analyses, we found that calling from the ground and using a baffle represent effective alternate strategies that both maximize calling efficiency.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest. ER -