Why do peacocks vibrate their feathers

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Or issuing threats. Or encouraging the young to do mating displays. To begin, the team might blindfold peafowl to see whether they react to waves of air that mimic a rattling tail. Kane also wants to study other birds, whose larger crests might be easier for a camera to follow. At least 35 candidate species have flexible crests and some kind of shaking display. Perhaps these species, though already dramatic and eye-catching, are also walking around with secret sense organs, hidden in plain sight.

Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic. Popular Latest. The Atlantic Crossword. A new paper in PLOS One concludes that the frequency at which those feathers vibrate can enhance this iridescent display—even as the eyespots remain almost perfectly still. The courtship behavior of peacocks is well known, and until quite recently, scientists had assumed that the female of the species peahens simply preferred males with longer feathered trains and more eyespots—the more brightly colored, the better.

More recent research indicates the peacock courtship process might be quite a bit more complicated than this. Some other factor could be at work.

Lead author Roslyn Dakin, a biologist at the University of British Columbia, was the first to film these courtship displays on high-speed video. Haverford College physicist Suzanne Kane saw the footage and realized it looked a great deal like the phenomenon of resonance in physics. Every material object has a natural resonant frequency at which it vibrates.

If there is another object nearby that is sensitive to the same frequency, it will absorb the vibrations emanated from the other object and start to vibrate in response. So they decided to collaborate to explore the precise biomechanics further. In March , Dakin and Kane spent two weeks in Arcadia, California, filming and recording peacocks during their courtship displays.

Not only does this produce a telltale rattle, but it has a unique visual effect: the background feathers appear to shimmer while the eyespots barely move at all. How does that affect her perception of the display?