The concave-eared torrent frog.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could hear each other over the low-frequency roar of jetliners and subway trains? For some rodents, bats, and marine mammals, environmental noise doesn’t normally pose a problem, as they can communicate at ultrasonic frequencies (greater than 20 kHz, just above our maximum hearing range). There are also a couple of amphibians that exhibit this trait, but in an odd twist, researchers have now learned that female concave-eared torrent frogs are deaf to the ultrasonic components of the males’ calls.

The concave-eared frog is a tree-loving native of the Huangshan Mountains in China. In choosing this woodsy area, the nocturnal amphibians must put up with one minor annoyance: streams that produce constant ambient noise. In 2006, Jun-Xian Shen, a biophysicist at the Chinese Academy of Science in Beijing, and his research team discovered that the frogs get around this sonic clutter by adding ultrasonic frequencies to their normal calls (pdf). The frogs were the first non-mammalian vertebrate found to do this, and scientists have since learned that Borneo’s hole-in-the-head frogs (yes, that’s the actual name) also chirp in ultrasonic frequencies. After finding these ultrasonic noises, ...