Animal acoustic communication maintains a universal optimum rhythm

Abstract

Most animals interact with conspecifics through acoustic signals that are modulated in frequency and rhythm. While small animals vocalize at higher pitch than large ones due to the smaller size of their vocal apparatus, the rules governing vocalization rhythms throughout the animal kingdom remain unknown. Vocal rhythms serve as a natural information parser, and one possibility is that they are constrained by the neural rhythms of transmitter and receiver, known to be relatively conserved across species and independent of their size. In this study, we quantified acoustic rhythms across taxa and investigated their evolutionary history with regard to phylogeny and selective pressure. In 98 species from six classes, we tested the main factors likely to influence their communication rhythms: morphology, physiology, social complexity, mastication and detectability. Phylogenetic modeling did not confirm the influence of these species-specific factors, but rather point to a scenario where acoustic communication rhythms have been maintained around an optimum at around 3Hz in the biological (neuronal) delta range (1-4Hz) well before the mammals split. These results suggest that the rhythm of acoustic communication signals, unlike their pitch, has a universal neural determinant that has been conserved throughout evolution, allowing for intra- and cross-species signaling.