Male birds can be good singers or good looking, but not both
17 October 2018
Not a great crooner
Georgette Douwma/Getty
By Yvaine Ye
The call of a male peacock is no pleasure to listen to, but its splendid tail means it doesn’t matter. Now an analysis of more than 500 species shows that this is a common trade-off in the bird world: the best lookers aren’t the most talented singers, while the best vocalists aren’t as easy on the eye.
Sexual selection is an evolutionary process that shapes traits that animals use to attract mates, and birds are well known to resort to elaborate songs and flashy feathers in the name of reproduction.
To investigate which species use which traits, Christopher Cooney at the University of Oxford and his colleagues collected the songs of 518 species, and compared these with their feather colours. In particular, they looked at how much feathers differed between the males and females of each species – a sign that sexual selection has influenced their plumage.
Dull but delightful
They found that birds in which one sex has more showy plumage than the other tend to have less interesting, more monotonous songs. In species in which the males and females more closely resemble each other, the males sing longer songs over a larger range of musical notes.
More:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2182725-male-birds-can-be-good-singers-or-good-looking-but-not-both/
I had to see how a Peacock sounds. Here's a YouTube example:
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