• BY GREG MILLER
• 07.24.13

Photo: Jebulon/WikiCommons

When a peacock fans his plumage and struts his stuff, it’s an impressive sight. Or so it appears to us humans. What really matters, of course, is what the female he’s trying to impress makes of it. In a new study, scientists mounted tiny eye-tracking cameras on the heads of peahens to try to get inside their minds as they watched males’ courtship displays.

The findings suggest that what a female pays attention to when she sizes up a potential mate isn’t what some researchers had thought.

All those dramatic eyespots? Meh. But the width of his feather train? She’s definitely checking that out. And when he turns around and shakes his tail feathers? That’s totally hot.

The peacock’s tail gave Darwin fits. At first, it seemed to fly in the face of his theory of natural selection. How could evolution possibly favor such cumbersome and conspicuous accoutrement? The very sight of those feathers, Darwin famously wrote to a colleague, made him sick. He soon realized, however, that the feathers might serve another purpose: enhancing the male’s reproductive success even as they made him more visible and vulnerable to predators. The concept of sexual selection was born, and the peacock’s tail remains a textbook example of it to this day.

But exactly what it is about the male’s display that females find attractive is far less clear.

Studies with feral peafowl at a British wildlife park in the 1990s suggested that it’s the ornamentation. Behavioral ecologist Marion Petrie of Newcastle University and her colleagues found that males with more eyespots mate more often. When the researchers used scissors to snip off 20 eyespots from several males, females showed less interest in them. Petrie’s work suggested that in the mind of a peahen, eyespots are pretty sexy.

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