Sexual selection in action: bird both sings and moonwalks

April 29, 2012 • 12:57 pm

Just remember that all this evolved from inorganic matter more than 3.5 billion years ago. Here’s a species of bird whose males both sing and dance for their supper—or rather their offspring. The dance comes from the May National Geographic:

Deep in the cloud forest of South America a tiny bird, the club-winged manakin  [Machaeropterus deliciosus], sings with its wings. As part of their courtship, males execute maneuvers with names like the dart, the about-face, the upright, and the backward slide (which looks exactly like a Michael Jackson moonwalk).

Wikipedia describes its music, which is made with its feathers, for crying out loud:

The Club-winged Manakin, with its unique ability to produce musical sounds, is indisputably the most extreme example of sexual selection in manakins.

Each wing of the Club-winged Manakin has one feather with a series of at least seven ridges along its central vane. Next to the strangely ridged feather is another feather with a stiff, curved tip. When the bird raises its wings over its back, it shakes them back and forth over 100 times a second (hummingbirds typically flap their wings only 50 times a second). Each time it hits a ridge, the tip produces a sound. The tip strikes each ridge twice: once as the feathers collide, and once as they move apart again. This raking movement allows a wing to produce 14 sounds during each shake. By shaking its wings 100 times a second, the Club-winged Manakin can produce up to 1,400 single sounds during that time.

While this “spoon-and-washboard” anatomy is a well-known sound-producing apparatus in insects (see stridulation), it had not been well documented in vertebrates (some snakes stridulate too, but they do not have dedicated anatomical features for it). An analysis was made using high speed photography in 2005. The mating preferences of female birds can produce not only the peacock’s tail or the rooster’s crow, but also feathers with microscopic adaptations that let them sing like crickets.

Here’s a video showing the song, also from National Geographic:

[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.1017814&w=425&h=350&fv=]

UPDATE: These males are clearly of different species; someone (not me) has made a mistake here. I’ll leave it to Lou Jost to clear it up.

 h/t: P.N.

21 thoughts on “Sexual selection in action: bird both sings and moonwalks”

  1. “Here’s a bird in males both sing and dance for their supper—or rather their offspring.”

    Here’s a bird in males? I cannot parse that, no doubt because I’m not a biologist. =^_^=

    1. Yep, definitely! A great manakin, but not the Club-winged. The second video is definitely a Club-winged Manakin. They lived in my yard in Mindo, Ecuador.

      1. Yes, the second is _Machaeropterus deliciosus_. Are they common in Quito? I’ll be there in August and I’d like to take some pictures of birds.

        1. No, these are cloud forest birds, and Quito is a desert. You can go to Mindo easily from Quito, though. It is only about 2 hrs away. The local bird guides should be able to show it to you. There are (or used to be) some easily-accessible leks.

          That species is very hard to photograph well, but with much patience you could do it. There are lots of other birds to photograph in Mindo too!

  4. This is a great manakin, but many other species of manakins are also amazing. The male Long-tailed Manakins put on a sort of breakdance contest for the female: two males will sit near each other, sing in unison, and do cartwheels over each other very fast, many times in succession, and the last one that ends up sitting in a special place on the branch gets the female. It is one of the very few co-operative displays in males; the dominant (older) bird always wins the contest, and the other bird is always second-fiddle and fails to mate. While this may seem like pure altruism (or stupidity), it turns out that the guy who plays second fiddle inherits the branch (and the females who know about the branch) after the dominant bird dies. Link to video:
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7891243.stm

    Then there is the male Wire-tailed Manakin, who does a sort of moon-walk on a set branch which is used continuously for years, and when a female comes near, he tickles her with specially-modified feathers which vibrate at high speed. If he does it right, they mate.

    Lots of other manakins do amazing things. They also really make a jungle guide look good, because they almost always use the same exact branch for their display day after day. Once a guide has been in a place for a few months, he will know exactly when and exactly where these amazing birds will perform. Guaranteed lifers for the guide’s birder clients!

    2. No one can resist a good tickle!

      Thanks for dense yet very approachable info.

    3. The cooperative male displays of the Long-tailed Manakin and its close relatives (eg Lance-tailed Manakin) provide a nice simple example of a falsifiable prediction of evolutionary theory. From evolutionary theory, we know that this system could not have evolved unless it provided some advantage to the “second-fiddle” bird in the form of later mating success. In contrast, alternatives to evolution, such as creation or intelligent design, are silent on the subject. The prediction of evolutionary theory has now been fulfilled thanks to careful fieldwork revealing that the co-operator inherits the lek and the females.

  5. How are we scientists *ever* going to connect with the young people (of 20 yr ago) if we don’t get our dancing entertainers correct? The Manakin’s dance looks *way* more like MC Hammer’s moves than Michael Jackson’s. The relevant moves begin at about 2:00 into the video:

  6. I hate to be a fussy trouble-maker, but that wonderful moonwalking manakin is NOT a club-winged manakin, (Machaeropterus deliciosus) but rather, a red-capped manakin (Pipra mentalis), the likes of which I recently had the pleasure of observing in my home-away-from-home, in Costa Rica. But don’t feel too bad: All manakins are wonderful!

  8. I fail to see how it “looks exactly like a Michael Jackson Moonwalk”. The mechanics of the bird’s legs are not right and the motion is very different.

    1. See the youtube clip above. It more closely resembles the movements of Hammeris Mcvulgaris

  9. Manakins are amazing birds. I spent hours watching white-bearded mnakins at a lek in Trinidad at Asa Wright Nature Center. The males selected two small upright plant stems on which to perch about two feet apart. When a female came into the area all the males(maybe two dozen) bounced on the ground to the other stem, having worn a bare spot on the ground between the two stems. Unfortunately, i had no video camera, just a still camera.

  10. The Wikipedia description is strange–if the two specialized wings hit each other 100+ times/sec, yes it’s 100 sounds but the effect is of a pitch.

    The pitch produced by the bird in the second video is a high F (or pretty close) which has a frequency of 1375Hz.

    If there are 7 feathers with special tips on each wing and the wings vibrate 100 times/sec and each wing makes a sound both on contact and on release that would be 1400/sec. (The article mentions ‘1400 sounds’)

    But that means the the 7 feathers are rippling into each other evenly one by one! If the all clicked at once the pitch would be a pretty low note at 100Hz (a little more than two octaves below the tuning A=440)

    That’s a pretty piercing sound, I’ll bet it could be heard from quite far away.

  13. Manakin dances have been a big feature of ornithology meetings for years. But birds of paradise are just as funky. If you’re interested, you can easily find your own link. A dance-off between manakins and birds of paradise would be way cool, though not very adaptive.

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