Pleasing to the eye
In a breeding experiment with Houbara bustards - a North African bird species with a very distinctive courtship behaviour, scientists have concluded that visual stimulation from attractive males of the same species positively affects brooding females, improving offspring growth. Females that observed highly displaying male birds in the experiment were more fertile and had a greater breeding success due to an increased allocation of testosterone into their eggs, leading to an increase in the growth rate in chicks. The results showed that using artificial insemination without appropriate stimulation of breeding females probably has negative impacts on their breeding performance and can therefore even affect the survival of a species, according to Adeline Loyau and Frederic Lacroix in the online edition of Proceedings of the Royal Society B...