What do we know about advertisement calls of Mexican anurans? A bibliographic review

ABSTRACT

In a fast-changing environment, it is important to keep track of biodiversity. In Mexico, new herpetofauna is described every year. Vocalisations can portray ecological and evolutionary characteristics for better understanding of species. Here, we lay out the current state of knowledge on advertisement calls of Mexican anurans, as well as the publication trends and the use of metadata through an exhaustive literature review and bibliometric analysis. We obtained 174 documents with advertisement call descriptions of 58.4% of Mexican anuran species published between 1940–2021. We identified that most of the species with call descriptions are distributed in the Neotropics and belong to endemic and endangered categories. Anuran call descriptions in publications are frequently accompanied by associated data such as relative humidity, call frequency, or recording format. The mean number of recorded characteristics per description was 12.568 (of 38). Although almost half of the Mexican species have associated advertisement call descriptions, we identified several knowledge gaps, particularly in the degree of information that each description contains. Furthermore, most of the identified studies were performed outside of Mexico by foreign researchers, despite the high level of anuran endemism in the country. We highlight the need for more detailed descriptions published by Mexican researchers.

KEYWORDS:

• Vocalisations
• anurans
• Mexico
• ecoacoustics
• bioacoustics
• collections

Acknowledgements

This paper is part of the requirements to obtain a master’s degree from the Posgrado en Ciencias Biológicas at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. We thank Dr. Roberto Sosa-López and Dra. Ella Vázquez-Domínguez for their useful comments and suggestions at different stages of the review. The first author SOF was supported by a scholarship 1084793 granted by the Mexican National Council of Science and Technology (CONACyT). We thank Brett Butler for English proofing the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in database format at the website of the Fonoteca de Sonidos de Anfibios de México of the Faculty of Sciences, National Autonomous University of Mexico at http://cantosanuros.fciencias.unam.mx/content/profile/publicaciones/Ordonez-Flores_etal_review_database.xlsx; DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.22659418.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/09524622.2023.2241046.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Mexican National Council of Science and Technology (CONACyT) [Master’s scholarship 1084793].