Too many males to choose from can overwhelm female frogs – and change who gets to mate

Researchers captured 60 female gray tree frogs from East Tennessee breeding choruses and tested how well they chose a single attractive mating call when it was presented alongside one, three or seven less attractive distractor calls, played without overlap. As distractor numbers rose, females grew worse at picking the attractive call, took longer to decide, and more often failed to choose within a 10-minute window, according to the study published in iScience.

Because the calls never overlapped, the researchers conclude the decline isn't caused by energetic masking, the usual explanation where overlapping sounds swamp a frog's ability to detect signals. Instead they attribute it to a cognitive limit on handling many options, which could let less attractive males improve their odds simply by calling from larger choruses.

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