Dating is weird.
There’s flowers, chocolates, and promises you don’t intend to keep.
But humans aren’t even the weirdest when it comes to love in the wild.
Hey lovers, Julia here for DNews
To paraphrase the comedian Aziz Ansari, our courtship rituals ARE WEIRD.
I mean if we like a person, we turn to them and say “hey you know this hanging out thing
we’re doing?
Let's do this until one of us is dead.
Also, wear this piece of metal and carbon on your finger so everyone else knows we have
an arrangement”.
But we aren’t alone in the animal kingdom when it comes to weird romance.
Oh no.
In the wild, lots of times it’s the male who is competing for female attention.
Usually males strut their stuff by displaying colorful markings, performing fanciful dances,
and or even by fighting with another male.
All to say “look at me!
I’ve got the best genes!
MATE WITH ME!”
But how does a pretty tail mean good genes?
Well, sexual selection sometimes means the flashiest animal is the fittest.
It’s when animals evolved traits to attract a mate.
I mean take a look at the peacock, probably the most famous example.
The males have these huge, pretty, but useless tails.
They aren’t good for anything other than putting on a good show.
But, the female peacocks think, because the male is able to devote precious resources
and time to a rather useless appendage and behavior, he must be in pretty good shape
and have pretty good genes.
Over time many animals evolved a little oddly because of sexual selection.
There’s lots examples of odd courting behavior in nature.
But I’ll just focus on my favorite three.
There’s the weird and wonderful hooded seal.
For hooded seals, size matters.
To entice a passing lady, male hooded seals inflate a giant red balloon-like hood out
of their left nostril and wave it around.
According to a study published in the Canadian Journal of Zoology seals also use these hoods
to produce calls and noises!
Usually these noises are to ward off a potential adversary, but 12% of the time, they’re
to woo a lady seal.
Besides the best call, the male with the biggest hood, gets the girl.
But if we’re going to talk about sexual selection, we have to talk about birds.
Birds man, birds are the best at flashy courting.
Kind of similar to hooded seals male frigatebirds, a tropical bird, have these huge red pouches
on their chests called a gular sac.
During mating season, the sac is bright red.
And the males gather in large groups of up to 30 individuals.
The females fly over the group and the males inflate their pouches and use their beaks
to drum on it to attract a mate flying over head.
In a study published in the journal The Condor, researchers found that the drumming on the
pouches helps to tell the females about the size of the pouch since the angle and distance
might make it hard to see.
Once the female picks her lucky guy, she swoops down and joins him.
He takes her beak in his and they walk off into the sunset.
But my favorite courtship ritual might be the bower bird.
The males of this Australian avian build elaborate structures to seduce a female.
Often the structure, or bower, is made of intertwining twigs and sticks.
Sometimes the structure resembles a little hut with an opening.
And out on the front lawn of this little hut, the bird collects things.
Lots of bright or shiny items.
It’s a garden of buttons or bottle caps or flowers.
All this building and collecting takes up precious time he could have spent hunting
or foraging for food, but they pay off is pretty great.
A female bird will come and sit in his bower and watch as the male performs a complex dance.
If she doesn’t like it, or finds him lacking in some way she’ll check out the bird next
door.
But sometimes the grass isn’t always greener on the other side.
She could come back... once she checks out a few places, she picks the one she likes
best.
Picking the one you like best is always hard choice, but the animal kingdom makes it a
little easier with things like flashy tails.
While we might not have a gular sac or nasal hood, there is always the tradition of giving
jewelry.
Speaking of, special thanks to Kay Jewelers for sponsoring this episode.
For the bowerbird, every kiss begins a button or bottle cap, for us humans, every kiss begins
with Kay.
So courting is just the first step to making future generations of seals and birds.
And every species seems to have their own strategy to making the beast with two backs.
Some animals even mate to the death!
To get the sexy suicidal scoop, check out this episode from Crystal.