Definitely a video that will make you laugh! The male red-capped Manakin (Pipra mentalis), a bird found in Costa Rica and Belize (watch out for it if you go there on the Field Course), does a rather cool moonwalk as part of its courtship ritual. It also produces some rather bizarre clicks with its wings. Two YouTube videos show these behaviours:

Researcher describes her work on the Manakin, including excellent high-speed film of how the wing-clicking, concluding with an odd imitation and a rather obvious M Jackson soundtrack.

Better footage, but the English soundtrack has been irritatingly overdubbed in what my ignorant ear thinks is either Russian or Polish. The bird will make you laugh, though.

The advantage of sex, we are told, is that it increases genetic variability and enables organisms to cope with changing environments. There is a rotifer (small freshwater invert) which has done without sex for 80 million years… How do they cope? BBC summary, original article and magazine article in Science (both need you or your institution to have a subscription to get past the abstract).

Seems like a daft question, but the genetic bases of these effects can be quite simple. This article from Science (subscription needed to get past abstract) gives an example from pied flycatchers and shows that the genes are sex-linked. There’s also this summary in the same issue (same rules apply). Thanks to Per Smiseth for this.

Interesting thought piece from BBC journalist Mark Mardell about the contradictory effects of EU policies on the Iberian Lynx. Includes sound of lynx love-making!

A female bonnethead shark (part of the hammerhead family) gave birth to a pup (yes, some sharks are viviparous – this was very important for realising that mammals have eggs. Read my book!). What was interesting is that she had not been in contact with a male – it was a case of parthenogenesis, unusual in such a large animal. Original article in Biological Letters (open access), BBC news item.

One of the key areas of evolutionary biology that is crying out for experimental data is sexual selection. This magazine article describes a recent article in Current Biology, which sheds new light on the “lek paradox”. Do male sexual traits (eg peacock “tails”) directly confer a genetic advantage or not? How can they if they are subject to strong sexual selection? In which case, why do females continue to discriminate when they get no genetic benefit?

Just the thing for final year students wanting to do some general revision - a Current Biology “primer” article on mate choice. The rest of you should read it, too!

Cool video of Firefly squid coming to shore in Japan in order to lay their eggs. (BBC news, may not work outside UK.)

The female praying mantis will eat the male (head first) while they’re mating. Right? Wrong. This character in fact shows substantial intra- and inter-specific variation. This study from Animal Behaviour many years ago examines some of the reasons – one of them appears to be that they are vicious predators, and if nosy scientists go looking at them too closely, the female tends to get scared, forgets what she’s doing, and ends up eating the nearest thing to hand…

Radio 4 programme about the difficulties faced by captive breeding programmes, in particular for the white rhino. Can be downloaded as MP3.