Page "Peafowl" Paragraph 16

The peacock is perhaps the best known example of traits believed to have arisen through sexual selection, though in recent years has become the object of some controversy.

It is known that male peafowl erect their trains to form a shimmering fan in their display to females.

Marion Petrie tested whether or not these displays signaled a male ’ s genetic quality by studying a feral population of peafowl in Whipsnade Wildlife Park in southern England.

She showed that the number of eyespots in the train predicted a male ’ s mating success, and this success could be manipulated by cutting the eyespots off of some male ’ s tails.

Females lost interest in prune males and became attracted to the untrimmed ones.

Further testing revealed that males with fewer eyespots, and thus with lower mating success, were more likely to suffer from greater predation.

Even more interesting, she allowed females to mate with males that had variable numbers of eyespots, and reared the offspring in a communal incubator to control for differences in maternal care.

Chicks fathered by more ornamented males weighed more than those fathered by less ornamented males, and attribute generally associated with better survival rate in birds.

When these chicks were released into the park and recapture one year later, those with heavily ornamented fathers were found to be better able to avoid predators and survive in natural conditions.

Thus, Petrie ’ s work has shown correlations between tail ornamentation, mating success and increased survival ability in both the ornamented males and their offspring.