Practice question · Multiple choice
A peacock's tail makes it slower, more visible to predators and expensive to grow. How does a trait that lowers survival spread?
Hints
- Fitness is measured in offspring. Ask whether living longer helps if you never mate.
- A signal that is cheap for everyone tells the peahen nothing. What does an expensive one tell her?
Show the answer
A. Because selection counts descendants, not lifespan
Why
Selection counts grandchildren, and a long safe life with no mates is an evolutionary dead end. The cost is doing double duty: it is the price of the ornament and the reason to believe it, since only a genuinely healthy male can carry that handicap and still be here.
Practise Mating Systems and Sexual Selection
The app has 7 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Psychology I is free to start.
More questions on Mating Systems and Sexual Selection
- In seahorses, where the male carries the developing eggs and invests more per offspring, parental investment…
- Select every statement that is TRUE about mating systems and sexual selection.
- In most species females are the choosier sex. In seahorses, where the male carries the developing brood, it…
- Sort each behavior by the type of sexual selection it represents.