In April, I spent two amazing weeks in the Costa Rican rainforest, watching White-ruffed Manakins displaying on logs while I hid in a small portable blind, taking notes and craning my binoculars to catch glimpses of color band combinations. It was an *incredibly* wonderful experience. Spending whole days in the rainforest, alone, watching and listening, fills me with a calmness and peace that is rather indescribable. It is almost meditative. I suppose it is easy to tell that I love fieldwork.
The manakin family, Pipridae, is part of the New World suboscines, a group I am fast falling in love with, paralleling my first great love of the Old World suboscines. My cousin, Elsie, is conducting a spectacular PhD project, studying how sexual and natural selection shape or constrain manakin lekking behavior in Costa Rica. I have long wanted to join her in the field and learn all about her amazing birds.
While there, I finished reading The Evolution of Beauty by Rick Prum and had several lengthy and enlightening discussions with Elsie about runaway sexual selection--where costly ornamental traits in males arise because they are aesthetically preferred by females and not because they are honest signals of quality or adaptive. Rick Prum calls this the "Beauty Happens" hypothesis and frames it as a null model of what happens in the absence of adaptive mate choice. We discussed whether it is an appropriate null and Elsie introduced me to the work of Mary Jane West-Eberhard who has also written about "Darwin's forgotten idea" of sexual selection as a driving force of arbitrary and aesthetic sexual ornamentation.
I wish I could have stayed longer. The whole two weeks were an incredible mix of observing new species in an amazingly rich ecosystem, and discussing science with one of my favorite people.
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