title: Multimodality: a way to cope with road traffic noise? The case of European treefrog (Hyla arborea).
abstract: In the last decades, traffic noise has become a new challenge for efficient animal communication and several studies suggest that it is involved in population declines. Although poorly investigated in a traffic noise context, communication is generally multimodal, which can be viewed as a way to improve communication efficiency by allowing shift from a sensory modality to another when one modality suffers from noise. In the present study, we investigated multimodal shift in the European treefrog (Hyla arborea), a species using both acoustic and visual cues during male quality assessment task performed by females. Females were used in a discrimination task in two environmental conditions: with or without traffic noise. In traffic noise conditions, we showed that females' reliance on acoustic signal embedded in noise pollution did not decrease in favour of visual signals, therefore showing that females do not shift between modalities in response to traffic noise. Although, we did not evidence multimodal shift in our study, many species facing traffic noise present multimodal communication, and should be investigated to evaluate the importance of multimodal shift as a way to cope with traffic noise pollution.
authors.affiliation: Université de Lyon, Université Lyon 1, CNRS, UMR5023 Ecologie des Hydrosystèmes Naturels et Anthropisés, Villeurbanne F-69622, France. Electronic address: mathieu.troianowski@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Mathieu
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Troïanowski
authors.affiliation: Université de Lyon, Université Lyon 1, CNRS, UMR5023 Ecologie des Hydrosystèmes Naturels et Anthropisés, Villeurbanne F-69622, France.
authors.forename: Geoffrey
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Melot
authors.affiliation: Université de Lyon, Université Lyon 1, CNRS, UMR5023 Ecologie des Hydrosystèmes Naturels et Anthropisés, Villeurbanne F-69622, France.
authors.forename: Thierry
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Lengagne
mesh_terms: D000819:Animal Communication; D000818:Animals; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D009622:Noise; D011898:Ranidae / Q000502:physiology*; D012726:Sexual Behavior, Animal / Q000502:physiology*; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*
keywords: Communication; Hyla arborea; Multimodal shift; Sexual selection; Traffic noise