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30 - Bowerbird Innovation and Problem-Solving

from Part VI - Innovation and Problem-Solving

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2021

Allison B. Kaufman
Affiliation:
University of Connecticut
Josep Call
Affiliation:
University of St Andrews, Scotland
James C. Kaufman
Affiliation:
University of Connecticut
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Summary

Behavioral innovation, the ability to invent new behaviors and/or use preexisting behaviors in a new context to respond to a novel situation, can be critical to an individual’s survival (i.e., natural selection). Less studied is how innovation can be critical for mating success (i.e., sexual selection). Bowerbirds are an excellent system to study the latter, given the likely importance of sexual selection to their diversification. Bowerbirds are a family of birds that show remarkable diversity in their unique construction of courtship arenas out of sticks and use of various colored objects as decorations. In this chapter, I give background on what bowerbirds are and present inadvertent evidence from experimental manipulations of their off-body sexual displays that bowerbirds are extremely flexible in their behavior. The bulk of the chapter reviews experiments in which novel problem-solving tasks were presented to bowerbirds and then their performance was compared to their mating success. I conclude by suggesting that an important future research goal should be to study how innovativeness affects the speciation process via sexual selection.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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