A Rajasthan High Court judge has claimed peacocks are celibate. Not only does our national bird have sex, he is not even monogamous and goes to great lengths to attract a mate
A costly tail
The peacock’s tail, though pretty, makes it hard for the bird to escape predators, especially in the rainy season. And it must also be completely regrown every year
You are my natural selection
Darwin then developed the idea of sexual selection, that females chose the best-looking males. A century later, a group in England led by biologist Marion Petrie tested the hypothesis. They found a strong correlation between the number of eyespots in a male’s tail and his number of matings.
The most elaborate male, with 160 eyespots, garnered 36 per cent of all copulations, writes Jerry Coyne in Why Evolution is True. But is it possible some correlated feature attracted the females? To rule it out, Petrie cut 20 eyespots off the tail of every male and found the deornamented peacocks were less successful
Size does matter
Biologist Malte Andersson glued long tails to African long-tailed widowbird males. The males with artificially long tails attracted nearly twice as many females as normal ones did