Figure 5

Statistical analysis of rhythms in the inter-pulse interval. (a) An example of inter-pulse intervals produced by a single individual during a single recording session. (b) An example of simulated inter-pulse intervals with a periodicity of 0.018 Hz, a SNR = 1, and sampling times derived from the data in panel a. (c,d) The Lomb-Scargle periodograms for the real data shown in panel a (c) and for the simulated data shown in panel b (d). Horizontal cyan lines indicate power where P = 0.05. (e, f) P-values of the local peaks in the Lomb-Scargle periodograms of inter-pulse interval for all 75 recordings of D. melanogaster (e) and for all 75 simulated datasets with a SNR = 1 (f) over the range of 0 to 1 Hz. Only P-values below 0.05 are plotted. The green bars below the axes in c-f mark the range of 0.016 to 0.22 Hz, which is the reported range of rhythms in the inter-pulse interval [9, 21–23, 46]. The asterisks within the green bars in d and f indicate 0.018 Hz, the frequency used in these simulations. The naturally skewed distribution of the real data, for example in panel a, differs from the distribution in the simulated data. We found, however, that culling the data to generate Gaussian distributed inter-pulse interval data resulted in even fewer significant peaks in the periodograms than shown in panel e and no obvious clustering of peaks in any particular frequency range (not shown). SNR: signal-to-noise ratio.