摘要The active transmission of information from sender to recelver is a fundamental component of communication,and is therefore a primary facet in evolutionary models of sexual selection.Research in several systetms has underlined the importance of multiple sensory modalities in courtship signals.However,we still tend to think of individuals as having a relatively static signal in consecutive communicative events.While this may be true for certain traits such as body size or coloration,behaviorally modulated signals can quickly violate this assumption.In this work,we explore how intraspecific variation may be an important component of interspeclfic signal divergence using cichlid fishes from Lake Maiawi.Behavloral analyses were made using six species of Malawian cichlids from two divergent genera.while interspecific differences were found between congeners based on species-level analyses of both acoustic and audiovisual signais,intraspecific variation was of a similar magnitude.Specifically,individual fishes were found to possess highiy plastic signal repertoires.This finding was ubiquitous across all species and resulted in a great deal of overlap between heterospecific individuals,despite statistically distinct species means.These results demonstrate that some aspects of courtship in Malawian cichlids are more plastic than previously proposed,and that studies must account for signal variability within individuals.We propose here that bebavioral variability in signaling is important in determining the communication landscape on which signals are perceived.We review potential complexity deriving from multimodal signaling,discuss the sources for such lability,and suggest ways in which is issue may be approached experimentally.