false - Tom Marshall
What are some of your favourite wildlife flirting techniques?
I'm a big fan of nuptial gifts. So, scorpion flies, collect spiders as a gift for the female. For them, a spider is such a nutritious meal, and to forego eating a spider to have a go at passing on your genes is a big evolutionary surprise. It gives a feel for how big a passion sex is for a lot of animals on earth.
Females are often pictured as quite a passive agent when it comes to courtship, but is this really the case?
Not at all, females are massive drivers of change. In some ways the reason that males have ended up like this is because of millions of unseen choices of females over the years.
A pregnant pause: Some animals, like badgers, can pause pregnancy in its early stages until conditions are better for bearing offspring.
Credit: Paul Browning, @macro.paul
Can you give me an example of something a female might look for when choosing a mate?
Research shows that a drake that has had his way with lots of females will often carry diseases. A greener, murky coloured beak indicates a diseased male, whereas healthier males have bright, yellow beaks. So, yellow beaks are more attractive to the females! If an undesirable male forces himself upon a female she can control her complex inner system to misdirect his advances, which can make her less vulnerable to disease. Due to this ability, despite forced copulation making up a third of duck matings, only 3% of the eggs produced come from these pairings.
Love on the brain- Studies show that some animals, such as the prairie vole, produce the same ‘love’ hormones in their brains as humans.
Credit: Sensory Ecology
Can you tell me an example of a reproductive strategy that might surprise us from what might seem like the everyday animal?
Male house spiders approach females and carefully drum a tune onto the web, that the females use to assess the male’s size. The stronger the drumming, the more the female is going to go ‘Wow, he is going to be really big and muscly, let's go for this!’. I love the fact that we think of our buildings as houses but really, they're just modified caves and the spiders that live in our houses are essentially cave spiders.
Prize or Guise? - Some male spiders will present fake nuptial gifts, instead wrapping up worthless objects such as a rock or flower to trick the female!
Credit: David Longshaw
Why are some species monogamous, despite it not seeming like a beneficial way to spread genes?
Monogamy is much rarer than we used to think. It's a phenomenon that appears when it's the only way in town to spread genes. So if you have populations of albatrosses for instance, messing up the social dynamics by cheating essentially is going to be more damaging to your kids than having a stable, long bond with another individual. Though situations like that are ecologically quite rare
