Science Musings Blog

Ok, here's a story for nerdy boys (like I was), who are at the top of their high-school calculus class but watch wistfully as the football heroes get the girls.

But first, bowerbirds.

Bowerbirds from Australia and New Guinea have rather extraordinary mating habits, including singing and dancing. In addition, male birds build matrimonial bowers -- or are they bachelor pads? -- to attract the females, elaborate constructions of twigs, grass, and baubles -- "shells, leaves, flowers, feathers, stones, berries, and even discarded plastic items, coins, nails, rifle shells, or pieces of glass." The biggest, gaudiest love nest gets the gal.

So far, nothing new. Females of many species, including perhaps our own, are attracted to males that show promise to provide bower and baubles. Geeks are not usually among the winners.

But here's the new development. Male bowerbirds, for some reason, dislike red objects in their bowers. Jason Keagy, a graduate student at the University of Maryland, put red objects in bowerbird nests and either covered them with transparent plastic or anchored them to the ground. In the first case, the male bird had to figure out how to remove and drag away the plastic cover. In the second, he had to hide the offending objects. As it turned out, the speediest problem-solvers scored the most sexual encounters with females. Keagy calls it "the first test of general cognitive ability being related to mating success for any species."

Well, it's always best to take experiments like this with a tablespoon of salt, at least until they are widely replicated and the correlations made firm -- but nerds like me are rooting for the brainy birds.