Data from: Tetrapod vocal evolution reveals faster rates and higher-pitched sounds for mammals
Data files
Nov 05, 2025 version files 347.61 KB
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bayou_birds.R
24.50 KB
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bayou_frogs.R
25.32 KB
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bayou_mammals.R
28.16 KB
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modif_laplacian_functions.R
4.99 KB
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Munoz_Marsot_et_al_2025_Evolution.xlsx
98.33 KB
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README.md
2.89 KB
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Tetrapod_evolution_analyses.R
54.92 KB
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Tetrapodtree.txt
108.50 KB
Abstract
Using the voice to produce sound is a widespread form of communication and plays an important role across a wide range species as well as contexts. Variation in the rate and mode of sound production has been extensively studied across different orders or classes, but understanding vocal signal evolution ultimately requires comparison across all major lineages involved. Here we used phylogenetic comparative methods to investigate the evolution of dominant frequency and its association with body weight across a balanced set of 873 species of mammals, birds, and frogs. Our results show that all vocal systems share the same general feature of the negative allometric relationship between body weight and dominant frequency, but that mammals clearly deviate compared to frogs and birds. We found mammals to vocalize at much higher frequencie,s and their signals evolved 4 to 6-fold faster compared to other tetrapod clades. Although all three groups strongly rely on vocal communication, our findings show that only mammals have extensively explored the spectral acoustic space. We argue that such high vocal diversity of mammals is made possible by their unique hearing system, and discuss the functional drivers that allowed their shared ancestors to evolve a richer array of frequencies than other tetrapods.
Dataset DOI: 10.5061/dryad.5tb2rbphd
Description of the data and file structure
Body mass and vocal frequency data from mammals, birds and frogs.
Files and variables
Data file: Munoz_Marsot_et_al_2025_Evolution.xlsx
Variables
| Column | Explanation |
|---|---|
| Species = | Species name according to the tetrapod phylogeny in Chen & Wiens (2020) Nat. Comm. |
| Family = | Taxonomic family |
| Order = | Taxonomic order |
| Class = | Taxonomic class |
| BM = | Body mass in grams |
| DF = | Dominant frequency (or equivalent measure) in Hz |
| Reference_BM = | Reference for body mass data |
| Reference_DF = | Reference for dominant frequency data |
| DF_comment = | Comment associated to dominant frequency data |
Missing data is indicated as "NA"
Scripts necessary for running the analyses are:
- Tetrapod_evolution_analyses.R
- modif_laplacian_functions.R
- bayou_birds.R
- bayou_frogs.R
- bayou_mammals.R
The session information (obtained from calling sessionInfo() inside R), including R and library versions used for the analyses, are shown at the bottom of each script. The phylogenetic tree (see below) and file containing the data (excel file) should be in the working directory inside a folder named "Tree_and_data" for the scripts to run adequately. The "modif_laplacian_functions.R" file contains a modification of the spectR_t() function from the RPANDA package (Morlon et al., 2016) to allow custom plotting the spectra of eigenvalues for the modified graph Laplacian of a tree with trait data, and should be saved in the working directory for the scripts to run adequately.
Phylogenetic tree from Chen & Wiens (2020) as text file:
- Tetrapodtree.txt
References:
- Chen, Z., & Wiens, J. J. (2020). The origins of acoustic communication in vertebrates. Nature Communications, 11(1), 369.
- Morlon, H., Lewitus, E., Condamine, F. L., Manceau, M., Clavel, J., & Drury, J. (2016). RPANDA: an R package for macroevolutionary analyses on phylogenetic trees. Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 7(5), 589-597.