When a pond gets crowded with many different species all calling to attract mates, some species alter characteristics of their call to avoid mating with a different species. This change in a population's call characteristics can even begin the process of speciation as that population’s call diverges from neighboring populations of the same species. Mukhopadhyay et al. (2026) studied how these differences in call characteristics are sensed and responded to by the brains of females in these populations with different calls. To do this, they studied a few populations of Upland Chorus frogs, Pseudacris feriarum, that did or did not have closely related species at their pond. They found long interval neurons responded differently in populations with and without other closely related species present. Thus, these neurons were tuned differently across populations in ways that may play a role in better recognizing calls from their own population and could influence mating behavior. Further studies on this system and others like it provide a unique opportunity to investigate the neural underpinnings of behavioral divergence as it unfolds in nature.

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