Slide 19 of 29

There are two reasons why it would be nice to have a model of the snowy tree cricket coupling that could simulate all aspects of their acoustic interactions. First, an adequate model would indicate that we sufficiently understand the system and its general process (although not necessarily the underlying mechanisms). Secondly, it would be nice to model group interactions to generate testable hypothesis for what happens to a large chorus of males. We tried a very simple model of a coupled oscillator to see if we could simulate the empirical data from male tree crickets. If one assumes that an oscillator’s phase shift due to a perturbing stimulus is completed within one period of the oscillator, then the response of that oscillator to a periodic stimulus can be obtained by iterating the PRC of the oscillator for successive periods of an entraining stimulus. Each time a stimulus is presented the model used the phase shift from the PRC to generate a new phase