Tools of the Pornithologist: Using Robots to Spy on the Sex Lives of Birds

all right I'm in the spot here okay I was thinking about the fact that my talk was so much less informative than the last talk on Mars so thank you for lowering the bar so significantly by showing videos of masturbating robots um my goal and my research is very very different than that and I'm going to talk about how we've used robots to spy on the sex lives of bir so you're all familiar with Darwin's theory of natural selection which is of course Very powerful in explaining the evolution of all sorts of traits like camouflage coloration and fish and insects and birds and it helps us understand how these traits allow animals to stay alive and have lots of Offspring and pass on their genes to the Next Generation but Darwin's theory of natural selection alone had a very difficult time explaining animals like the peacock where these elaborate traits and behaviors seem to make the male an easy target for predators and this was a big deal for Dar and he was stressed out about this there's this great letter that he wrote to his friend where he said the sight of a feather in a peacock's tail whenever I gaze at it makes me feel sick and he was kind of a sickly guy so we can't blame it all on a peacock but um but this was this was a big deal for his theory a big threat to his theory and so like many things in biology most things in biology Darwin himself proposed the solution to this problem which is his theory of sexual selection and that can play out in two ways it can be males or um whichever sex is competing battling together for access to mates and resources like we see with elephant seals or eles U but another way that this can play out is by female Choice when females prefer to mate with the most ornamented of males or whichever sex is choosy and whichever sex is flashy usually females are choosy usually males are clashy so this plays out when females basically demand that males have elabor display traits so in the case of p p hens prefer to made with males that have more eye spots on their trains okay so the question of why males have these elaborate trains why do peacocks have these beautiful trains is because pens are demanding them and so pens in a way females in many of these species act like artists over evolutionary time I'm shaping these gorgeous gorgeous creatures into their aesthetic demands or their aesthetic WIS but why would a female bother to be paying attention to the number of eye spots on the male's train what did she get so in many of these species like the peow and the sage gr and the bow birds that I'll tell you about today many of the most extraordinary species males don't provide any parental care they don't help the females raise the young females don't live on the male's territory the only thing she gets from the male when she makes with him is sperm so if all she's have sperm why does she care if the male had lots of eye spots on his train there's a few hypotheses for these there's evidence for all of them in some cases but why I pay attention to traits one possibility is that she's learning about his genes so she's trying to pick a male that has good jeans that are going to make her Offspring healthy or sexy or both and she can be learning about benefits that she may gain and in the case of the POU and the sage Rous and the bow bird that might just mean avoiding males that are covered in parasites or have STDs or something like that or she could just be a sucker for this sort of dazzling sexiness right so he could be trying to sort of Mesmerize her with his shimmering train which if you've ever seen a peacock por it kind of it kind of looks like that and so regardless of which of these things is true or if all of them are true to some extent the female is in control of the situation she's the one that's deciding when happens or doesn't happen but in all of these species in peow as well as lots of other species courtship isn't just about the male sort of unfurling his train and the female passively observing and checking them out PPS are these elaborate and dynamic interactions with lots of different things going on they complex Affairs and so for a male to be successful he doesn't just have to have a lot of eye spots on his train he also has to be in the right place at the right time he has to figure out which females to approach and then he has to approach the female without scaring her away and then they have to interact appropriately during courtship and so success in courtship is not just about the flashy traits it's also about paying attention to the social situation so Darwin's process of sexual selection May favor not only flashy traits but also social intelligence and so in a room full of nerds of course the Nerds I'll say yay sexual selection favors intelligence I'm smart that's great but then of course we remember that we're talking about social intelligence which is social skills which is not an arena in which nerds are known for their high functioning abilities right so but we know that in in these different species there's strong strong selection for social intelligence so maybe maybe we can learn something from them and this is certainly ill advised but it's nerd night we've all had some drinks and so maybe we can ask is there any dating advice that we can glean from nerds to nerds right so we'll keep that in mind as we talk about the different species that we've studied in my lab using robots Okay so the first species I'm going to tell you about is the species that I study for my dissertation research satin Bower birds are absolutely fantastic animals they're in eastern Australia and the rainforest they're absolutely beautiful uh and so the males build this structure called the bow it's this two- walled stick structure here and a platform of sticks out in front which they decorate with lots of different things they love the color blue and they also love yellow contrasting with the blue any sort of Novel objects we had one Bower that had a baby's Pacifier on it I always imagin that it plucked from the mouth the screaming baby anything that they can use to impress the female so here's the female she flies around visits lots of different males for courtship the male will do a song and dance for her and then she'll decide who she wants to M with and females prefer males with a symmetrical well-built power lots of decorations and excellent song and dance so we know from them that um from previous research on these birds we know that females sorry females prefer intense and vigorous male displays so females like a male is a very vigorous song and dance for her but we also know that sometimes these vigorous songs and dance freak the female out they scare her she gets startled sometimes flies away and so the male is walking this fine line where he has to he has to dance intensely to impress her but if he's too intense to assume can scar her away right so this this very complex interplay and I notice watching Court chips the females when they first survive they're very jittery but after a while they start start crouching down and they get a little more comfortable and at that point the male can sort of ramp it up she's less likely to be startled so I wondered our males paying attention to this so our successful males are paying attention and adjusting their courtship accordingly so that's what I set out to test and in order to test that hypothesis you really want to be able to manipulate the female Behavior you want to be able to get the female to do a particular thing and then measure how males respond and ask are the most responsive males the most successful and that's tricky to do with real animals it's hard to study natural courtships and do this because it turns out that with a really unattractive males females just never even go visit him so you can't really study how he does in courtship cuz he doesn't have the opportunity and when they do go visit him they act totally differently than they do when they're being ported by attractive males so really you need some way to experimentally control this so that's where the robots come in so this was the first robot I built this is a robot sat bber these are the electronic in of the robot and I dressed that up like a satin B bird in a state-ofthe-art robot fabrication facility and the rainforest Shack and then the finished product looked like this so this is a female and I can place her inside of the walls of the B where courtship would normally happen I take the remote control hi in a blind I can control her behavior and see how the males respond so this is a little video clip of what this looks like and this first little clip here is to just show you some of the troubleshooting you had to do to get this to work oh there you go so hopefully not too much trauma for the beta tester [Music] males okay so this is the finished robot and she's demonstrating this crouchy Behavior I was telling about when a female is really ready to make she flps up her wings and that's how she solicits population from the [Music] mail this so here here's the male doing this intense display with a yellow leaf in his [Music] feet you can see how it would be Starling to a female now he's going to a CU and a honey eater and in case you're not convinced yet [Music] this was the last night of our field season we head on made little stage do you give the idea okay so we used the robot we conducted experiments we tested males with different rates of female crouching and different behaviors and so what did we find what are the take- home messages from what we found I'm not showing you any plocks I'm I'm happy to get into the details if anyone's interested what did we find we found that the most successful males these are the males that are the most successful at convincing real females to May with them they displayed at the highest intensity the most vigorous displays without freaking females out and they did this by paying attention to female signals during courtship to avoid coming on too strong to soon so basically they watch the female behavior and we tested this with the robot and they only ramped up their intensity after the female was crouching whereas these unsuccessful guys would just do what they were going to do regardless of what the female was doing and they they just played way too intensely before she was ready they startled real females they were less successful like hardship with real females so if we wanted to boil this down and sort of summarize what we found into what might constitute some dating advice from a bow bird it would be something like this take it down a notch you know overeager Beaver does not get the worm and then listen pay attention to the female and I do want to emphasize here that I do not actually Advocate taking dating rice for Birds I really want to emphasize that um for a number of reasons in case there's any Congressional AIDS watching from National Science Foundation well we're looking for examples of NSF grants used to fund frivolous research for example and we're already on Senator C's list from last year so move along it's a badge of honor anyway um but it's always ill thank [Applause] you excellent that that's an Applause line okay so that's what we found from BDS so now let's turn to the greater stage Crow so this is the species that I study now these guys are found in North America a little closer to home we even have some populations in California the Eastern side of the sieras absolutely beautiful birds I study them in Wyoming at a SP site um in land or the east side of the Wind River range it's beautiful part of the Rocky Mountains absolutely spectacular and we spent about 3 months out there every spring I just got back a few weeks ago we make our own little trailer park in the middle of nowhere we call Chicken camp or cold mud pit Wyoming depending on the weather and we live out there for a few months with field assistants that help us do all of this work and so we're out there to study the sage Crow so I don't know if you can see it in this video say time lapse with the moon setting over the Wind River range in the background all these little bits bouncing around on the foreground these are all males string so this is a Le the males arrive on the Le territory this area every morning during the breeding season they puff up and sprad around dance for females females are cryptic you can't see them but they're moving around in and amongst the males basically comparison shopping for roommate they're trying to decide decide who they want to mate with once they mate that's the end of their relationship female takes care of the young our own and does everything else the male continues dancing and tries to convince other females to make with him and not all males are equally successful some males get almost all of the m so what does this look like up close this is a closeup view of sage CR courtship the first sound right here is basically a belch he's exchanging air from this inflated itself and then the second sound is a swishing of Wings Over modified feathers on his chest and then that's followed by a vocal [Music] sound we tell them apart by the pattern of plumage on their tails and you can see they're very fan they've got a lot going on PS on the top of their heads Combs over their eyes amazing slaves and they're totally weird and unir likee in almost every way so what does a female satos want what is she looking for in a mate and I hope that's not totally cut off cuz this is an important mail at the bottom so when we talk about what a female wants I'm going to talk about in the context of one particular male Sage Rous who was very special he dominated breeding on Cotton Tail Le one of our main study Lees not this spring but the previous spring 2014 and our field crew niit tamed him dick which opened up this whole Arena of innuendo to us so let's talk about there so these are all hens I don't know if you can see over here you can certainly see on the side over there he's surrounded by hens he absolutely dominated mating so last spring we're still counting all the populations from videos we bring back to UC Davis I lots of undergrounds counting populations from videos this is the porthy component to all of this but as of just this week we have over 13 different populations last break he was out there again this year he's still gone he doesn't he dominate quite as extraordinarily but 130 populations 37 of those were on one morning 23 of those were in one 23 minute long period of time so for once a minute for 203 minutes he made it with a different pen it was truly truly extra so what is it about Dick what makes a sexy stage for house sexy and this has been study for a long time people have been asking this question for a long time so what do we know show up and work hard is the number one piece of advice from St so dick here is the first to arrive on the lock at the beginning of the breeding season first to arrive every morning last to leave and he's there he's working it don't be scabby so females don't like males that have lots of visible scars from Echo parasites on their vocal sacks so it's hard stating advice goes avoiding visible scabs from lights it's hard to argue with right that's solid solid Common Sense advice have lots of other hens around so it turns out that hens pay attention to what other hens are doing so if you can convince a few females to V with you then there will be a Cascade of populations especially if those are older hens because younger hands will pay attention to what the older hands are doing and just copy what they're doing so once you have this giant scrum of females all gather around all competing for access to you then you've got it made and sound good so sound is critical females like males that sound good and sound is Central to all sorts of aspects of sage grous breeding so these are what we know are important from past research including some of our own but it's hard work to do this not every male can be a dick right it takes a lot of work to be sexy we know that string is energetically costly takes lots and lots of energy these guys get their energy for sage Rush this is not easy and previous work suggested that there's possibly a quantity quality tradeoff going on so you can either scut a lot which females like or you could sound really good which females like but doing both is really really hard okay so we know that this takes a lot of work and it's very difficult to do and so we asked how should a male spend his energy to maximize reproduction so if you got limited energy how should you spend it tactically to maximize reproduction because of course matings are the currency of selection right this is what matters in terms of who passes on the genes to the Next Generation and how we end up shaping these kinds of behaviors so what do we expect males to do to maximize reproduction so we predicted that successful males would spend their effort when it matters the most right so you're going to invest when it matters the most by paying attention to femal in a variety of different ways so again we need to look at controlling the female side of that conversation using robots and so the first generation robot is right here this is uh she wrote around on g-scale train tracks she had a little video camera and microphone on board she was fairly primitive and um she's a little bit chesty and a bit of a train wreck so we call her Anna Nicole we do a lot of good research out of anle where we retire her by crashing through a pyramid which I have on video if anyone's interested that but this is a little bit of the video that we collected with the on board robot camera [Music] [Applause] that was an unsuccessful Court unsuccessful experiment it was actually a very successful from the perspective of a male 189 who never knew that it wasn't a real female but we learned to get a lot better at avoiding that totally wor it in the video okay so that was generation one robot this is the beginning of the second generation of robot so it arrived like this in the mail from my engineering friends we designed it together this is what they sent me it looked like a sort of escaped rotisserie chicken angry esap rotisserie chicken the next phase looks like an angry SN M Escape rotisserie chicken a little hard to describe but I brought that phase up here on the stage J's welcome to come up and check them out afterwards and then I dressed them up to look like a real bird using skins from the G fish freezer that get turned in his Road kills Etc and this is the finished product so this is the next Generation she rides around on pretty Burly badass tires there and we call her snooky so snooky has much she's got some skills she can do some things besides just cruise around and look back and forth she can also look she can imitate behaviors that are important to female Sage brows so the first behavior is just looking really not all that interested in mating and the females forage when they're moving around the left um I don't if you can see that very well but she's basically just pecking at the ground foraging cruising around the Leck that's what females do when they're really not all that interested in mating anytime in the near future they're more interested they spend more time kind of upright looking around actually paying attention to what the nails are doing and so we can drive her around to where we need her to be on the all right so back to Dick let's just to refresh ourselves on what we know is important in mating we know that sexy stage GRS show up and work hard they're not scabby they have lots of other hens around and they sound good so what else have we found using the fembots what can we add to this list about social intelligence so just to again summarize in very general terms what kinds of things we found a few of our key results first we found that successful males so getting males that mate a lot with real females successful males save their energy by displaying at the highest rate only when hens are close and this is when hens are really assessing male display rate so this is one it matters the most in influencing the female's decision and and by doing so they show no tradeoff between quantity and quality so they save their energy and they can put on a really good show when it's most likely to influence the females Behavior unsuccessful males again are just blasting away at a mediocre level all the time and then when a female actually does get up close like when you send a robot in they don't have anything up right so they give her a really crappy show so if we were to then summarize this or some sort of take home message that might function as dating advice from the stage crows it would look something like this don't dance like no [Music] one solid advice okay so the next thing we found this is a different study still being analyzed but we found that successful males save their energy by investing more courtship effort in females who show signs of being interested in populating so basically these successful males dick and his friends just don't waste they don't spend much time on females that don't look actually interested in meting and this is why it's dangerous to take dating advice from Sage brous or to try to give dating advice from Sage grous because really that's not advice I want to give right there um but in case anyone is even thinking about taking that advice um I would remind you you are not a sage grass I will also remind you that evolution is not an excuse and don't be a dick okay so just to wrap up then I do you probably notice stage Rouse in the news a lot lately hopefully you've seen stage grass in the news for a lot of different reasons one of those reasons is that they're declining in numbers dramatically and there's a listing decision a decision about whether they're going to end up on the endangered species list in September or October of this year unless of course uh House Republicans can stop it by adding ERS onto spending bills where they're trying to just prevent the decision from actually being funded and that probably won't stop it but uh but they're trying the most recent attempt is amazing it's arguing that Congress must act to protect military Readiness because protecting stage grows could hurt the military um so it may seem like in the midst of these conservation concerns and threats to our very National Security caused by Sage that that studying courtship behavior is a little esoteric and I know I don't need to defend basic science at nerd I right because we're all on board with the importance of basic science but I'm going to do it anyway just for a minute and that is to make a case for why it's important to do this basic science on Sage brows despite all of this going on so Sage brows have been an important model system and evolutionary NBA biology for decades people have been studying these guys is to cover from 1932 nature Magazine with a stage grass on it so people have been studying these guys for a long time and we've learned so much from them about the way the world Works about how sexual selection Works how leing evolves we've learned all sorts of things with save crows and we talk about lots of different reasons why it would be terrible species Go extin including their important role in the ecosystem and all sorts of very important reasons but one thing that we often forget to think about is just the intellectual loss of not being able to continue learning from these absolute amazing species like we have been for so long so in addition to that there's also the importance of just understanding their behavior in these natural pristine environments so they're natural reproductive behaviors so that when those environments change like this bird here who's the last bird reming on the Le of a natural gas field on the other side of the Wind River Range mountains where I work um where he's surrounded by natural gas drilling rigs so we understand how these kinds of land needs Chang are going to affect the same TR and these are not isolated land use changes this is very hard to see but that's what that gas field looks like from Google Earth each of these spots represents one of these giant drilling GS so this is huge and widespread and I've done a lot of work in my lab um looking at the impact of this kind of development on Sage CR breeding behaviors and looking at noise pollution p on sounds and other aspects of their reproduction it connects really strongly with the basic Behavioral resarch that we've done and it's not just natural gas and fossil fuels it's also solar energy and wind energy lots of grain energy as well as other kinds of Ling changes that have been happening for Generations already so as the need for conservation action becomes even more acute there's more need than ever for both basic and applied science to understand and protect this remarkable bir not just for data of course and so with that I just want to say thank you to all these F sources if I have time I'm happy to take any questions [Applause]