Attraction Strategies Change With Age For Some Birds

For most young men, their strategy for getting a girl's attention is going to change radically as they age, where what may work in high school will most certainly not be a good idea for your average college graduate. Now new research has revealed that some birds aren't much different, changing their displays and behaviors as they age.

That's at least according to a new study published in the journal The American Naturalist, which details the sexual drivers and strategies for female attraction for a type of lekking bird called the black grouse (Tetrao tetrix).

Lekking in itself is an intriguing sexual attraction strategy, in which the males in a single community of these birds will gather together during mating seasons in an open area to essentially put on a show for females. This is unusual because, unlike more territorial or aggressive birds, the black grouse males are willing to share the "stage" for this event, called a lek.

This mating ritual is also exceptionally convenient for researchers, as it allows them to observe all the varied attraction strategies and displays of numerous males at once.

After observing these leks in Finland for a prolonged period of time, and noting the various ages of each male in the observed populations, the researchers showed that seven behavioral and morphological traits are strongly age-dependant in the black grouse.

Most notably, the success and complexity of their displays peaked when they were in their reproductive prime (3-4 years old).

Interestingly, maturity varied with life span as well, meaning males who matured slowly and lived shorter lives waited for longer to pull out all the stops when trying to find themselves a mate. There was even evidence that there was a renewal of lekking effort in the final years of a grouse, even if the expression of some traits had declined.

"This study shows that fully understanding the variation in sexually selected traits and fitness benefits associated with sexual selection requires accounting for the complex interaction among individual age, life span, and the timing of individuals' investment in reproduction," the researchers explained.

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