One of the main reasons for coming to California this year is that I’m doing an experiment to understand how peahens choose their mates. Specifically, I’m testing whether the colour of the males’ eyespot feathers is important.
My methods? Hundreds of coloured stickers, cut from sheets of sail tape.
The good news is the sail tape seems to work – most of the stickers stay on the feathers, and, since they’re so light, they don’t seem to have any effect on how easy it is for the males to display their tails.
I have a couple of treatment groups: control males with no stickers, males with black stickers (like the rather unlucky one pictured above; compare him to the male pictured here), and males with white stickers…
Everyone at the Arboretum wants to know what we’ve been finding. I have to shrug when they ask me – it will take many hours of observation over the next few weeks before I can say whether the black/white treatments have any effect on the females (we haven’t seen a single copulation yet). One thing I didn’t anticipate is the extent to which the white dots manage to captivate human observers. The black dots, on the other hand, don’t even get noticed by people. My guess is that the peahens won’t be so oblivious.
ps. The new header photograph of mechanical birds was taken by Charlie at the MIT museum. And, for those concerned about the possible effect of the weight of the stickers [Martin], we’ve applied stickers to the backs of the feathers of a bunch of birds as well…
From March 13, 2008