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Integrative and Comparative Biology Advance Access published online on September 16, 2009
Integrative and Comparative Biology, doi:10.1093/icb/icp088
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology. All rights reserved. For permissions please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.

Environmental influences in the evolution of tetrapod hearing sensitivity and middle ear tuning

Marcos Gridi-Papp1,2,* and Peter M. Narins*,{dagger}
* Department of Physiological Science, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA; {dagger}Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA

Correspondence: 1E-mail: mgridipapp{at}pacific.edu

Vertebrates inhabit and communicate acoustically in most natural environments. We review the influence of environmental factors on the hearing sensitivity of terrestrial vertebrates, and on the anatomy and mechanics of the middle ears. Evidence suggests that both biotic and abiotic environmental factors affect the evolution of bandwidth and frequency of peak sensitivity of the hearing spectrum. Relevant abiotic factors include medium type, temperature, and noise produced by nonliving sources. Biotic factors include heterospecific, conspecific, or self-produced sounds that animals are selected to recognize, and acoustic interference by sounds that other animals generate. Within each class of tetrapods, the size of the middle ear structures correlates directly to body size and inversely to frequency of peak sensitivity. Adaptation to the underwater medium in cetaceans involved reorganization of the middle ear for novel acoustic pathways, whereas adaptation to subterranean life in several mammals resulted in hypertrophy of the middle ear ossicles to enhance their inertial mass for detection of seismic vibrations. The comparative approach has revealed a number of generalities about the effect of environmental factors on hearing performance and middle ear structure across species. The current taxonomic sampling of the major tetrapod groups is still highly unbalanced and incomplete. Future expansion of the comparative evidence should continue to reveal general patterns and novel mechanisms.

2Present address: Department of Biological Sciences, University of the Pacific, 3601 Pacific Avenue, Stockton, CA 95211-0110, USA


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