 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. My goal in 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 birds. 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 herds. And it helps us understand how these traits allow animals to stay alive and have lots of offspring and pass other genes to the next generation. But Darwin's theory of natural selection alone had a very difficult time explaining animals like the peacock, and these elaborate behaviors seemed to make the male an easy target for predators. And this was a big deal for Darwin. 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 the same. And he was kind of a sickly guy, so we can't blame it all on a peacock. But 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 whichever sex is competing, battling together for access to mates and resources like we see with elephant seals or elves. 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 on whichever sex is flashy. Usually females are choosy, usually males are flashy. So this plays out when females basically demand that males have elaborate display traits. So in the case of p-how, p-hens prefer to mate with males that have more eye spots on their trains. So the question of why males have these elaborate trains, why peacocks have these beautiful trains is because p-hens are demanding them. And so p-hens, in a way, females in many of these species act like artists. So for evolutionary time, shaping these gorgeous, gorgeous creatures into their aesthetic demands. So their aesthetic wins. But why would a female bother to be paying attention to the number of eye spots on a male's train? What does she get from that? So in many of these species like the p-how and the sage-brow and the power birds that I'll tell you about today, and many of the most extraordinary species, males don't provide any parental care. They don't help the females raise young females don't live on a male's territory. The only thing she gets from the male that she mates with them is sperm. So if all of these have their 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 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 genes that are going to make her offspring healthy or sexy or both. And she can be learning about benefits that she may gain in the case of the p-how and the sage-brow and the power birds 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 she could be trying to sort of mesmerize her with this shimmering train. But she, if you've ever seen a peacock porch 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 what may make happen so it doesn't happen. But in all of these species, in p-how as well as lots of other species, Kurchuk isn't just about the males from conferring this train and the female passing the observing and checking them out. Kurchuk studies elaborate and dynamic interactions with lots of different things going on, complex affairs. And so for a male to be successful, he doesn't just have to have a lot of eye spots on this 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 Kurchuk. And so success in Kurchuk is not just about the flashy trains. It's also about paying attention to the social situation. So Darwin's process of sexual selection may favor not only flashy trains but also social intelligence. And so in a room full of nerds, of course, the nerds all say, hey, hey, 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 arena in which nerds are known further by functioning abilities. But we know that in these different species, there's strong, strong selection for social intelligence. So maybe we can learn something from them. And this is certainly ill-advised that this nerd and I, we've all had some drinks. And so maybe we can ask, is there any dating advice that we can lean from nerds to nerds? 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 studied from my dissertation research. Satin bower birds are absolutely fantastic animals. They're in Eastern Australia. They'll rain for us. They're absolutely beautiful. And so the males build this structure called the bower. There's two walls, stick structure here. A platform of sticks out in front, which they decorate with lots of different things. They love the color blue. 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 was imagining that it plucked from the mouth of a 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 a courtship. The male will do a song and dance for her and then she'll decide who she wants to make with. And females prefer males with a symmetrical, well-built bower with lots of decorations and excellent song and dance. So we know from them that for previous research on these birds, we know that females prefer intense and vigorous male flies. So females like a male does a very vigorous song and dance for her. But we also know that sometimes these vigorous songs and dance break the female out. So they stagger, they get startled, they sometimes fly away. And so the male is walking this fine line where he has to dance intensely. You impress her, but he's too intense to assume that he's getting her away. So this is very complex interplay. And I noticed watching courtships with females when they first fly, they're very jittery. But after a while they 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, are males paying attention to this? So are successful males sort of 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 females 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 analysts. It's hard to study natural courtships and do this because it turns out that with really unattractive males females just never even would visit him. So you can't really study how he does a courtship because he doesn't have the opportunity. And when they do go visit him they act totally differently than they do when they're being courted 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 satin mower bird. These are the electronic innards of the robot. And I dressed that up like a satin mower bird in a state of the art robot fabrication facility. Rainforest Jack. And then the finished product looked like this. So this is a female. And I can place her inside of the walls of the bower where a courtship would normally happen. I take the remote control, hide it in the lines. 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. Okay, so this is the finished robot. And she's demonstrating this crouching behavior I was telling you about. When a female is really ready to make cheese, plus up her wings, and that's how she solicits the population from the male. You can see how it would be started. We conducted experiments. We tested males with different rates of female crouching and different behaviors. So what would be fine? What are the take home messages from what we found? I'm not showing you any plots. I'm happy to give you the details if anyone's interested. What would be fine? We found that the most successful males into the males, they're the most successful at convincing real females to make with them. They displayed the highest intensity, the most vigorous display, without freaking females out. And they did this by paying attention to female signals to a courtship to avoid coming on too strong too soon. So basically they watched the female behavior. 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 females did. They displayed way too intensity before she was ready to start a real female to make her less successful at courtship 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 bower bird, it would be something like this. Take it down a notch. You know, the overeager viewer does not get the word. And then listen, pay attention to the female. And I do want to emphasize here that I do not actually advocate taking dating advice from birds. I really want to emphasize that for a number of reasons. In case there's any congressional aid watching from the National Science Foundation, while we're looking for examples of NSF grants used to fund privileged research, for example, we're already on Senator's Coverns list from last year. So move along. It's a badge of honor anyway. So now let's turn to the greater stage for us. So this is the species that I study now. These guys are found in North America. A little closer to home. You don't have some populations in California and the eastern side of the Sierras. They're absolutely beautiful birds. I study them in Wyoming in a spill site in Lander, the east side of the Wind River Range. It's a beautiful part of the Rocky Mountains. It's absolutely spectacular. And we spent about three months out there every spring. I just got back a few weeks ago. We made our own little trailer park in the middle of nowhere. We've got a chicken camp. We pulled from that pig in Wyoming, depending on the weather. And we lived out there for a few months with field assistants that helped us do all of this work. And so we're out there to study the Sierras. So I don't know if you can see it in this video, it's time lapse of the moon setting over the Wind River Range in the background. All these little bits bouncing around the foregrounds are all males strutting. So this is a lec. The males provide on the lec territory, this area. Every morning during the breeding season they puff up and strut around, dance for females. Females are predicted you can't see them, but they're moving around in and amongst the males, basically comparing some shopping for a mate. They're trying to decide who they want to mate with. Once they mate, that's the end of their relationship. Female takes care of the younger one and does everything else. The male continues dancing and tries to convince other females to live with them. And not all males are equally successful. Some males get almost all of the mate. So what does this look like up close? This is a close-up view of Sage Trouse courtship. The first sound they get here is basically a velch. He's exchanging air from the inflated esophagus. And then the second sound is a swishing of wings over modified feathers on his chest. And then that's followed by a vocal sound. We tell them apart by the pattern of a plumage on their tails. And you can see they're very fancy. They've got a lot going on. They file looms on top of their heads. And they're told what does a female Sage Trouse want? What is she looking for in a mate? And I hope that's not totally cut off. Because this is an important male at the bottom. So when we talk about what a female wants, I'm going to talk about it in the context of one particular male Sage Trouse, who was very special. He dominated breeding on Contail Lake, one of our mate study lakes. Not this spring, but the previous spring, 2014. And our field crew named him Dick, which opened up this whole arena of innuendo to us. You can see over here by hands. So last spring, we're still counting all the populations from videos. We bring back to UC Davis. I have lots of undergrads counting populations from videos. This is the pathology component of this. But as of just this week, we have over 130 different populations last spring. He was out there again this year. He's still growing. He didn't 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 20 of the different pen, it was truly, truly extraordinary. So what is it about Dick? What makes a sexy Sage Trouse sexy? And this has been steady for a long time. People have been asking this question for a long time. So what do we know? Show up and work hard. This is the number one. So Dick here is the first to arrive on the lake at the beginning of the breeding season. First to arrive every morning. Last to leave. I left him there. He is working it. Don't be scabby. We also have lots of visible scars from ecoparasites on their bone sacs. So it's hard stating advice goes avoiding visible scabs from mice. 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 convince a few females to make a few, then there will be a cascade of populations. Especially if those are older hens, because younger hens will pay attention to what the older hens are doing and just copy what they're doing. So once you have this giant scrum of females all gathered around, all competing for access to you, then you've got to make it. And sound good. So sound is critical. Females like males that sound good and sound is central to all sorts of aspects of stages or house 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 strutting is energy. I think that costly takes lots and lots of energy to get their energy from sagebrushes. It's not easy. And previous work suggested that there's possibly a quantity quality trade-off going on. So you can either sweat a lot which females like or you can sound really good which females like, but doing both is really, really hard. 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've got limited energy, how should you spend it tactically to maximize reproduction? Because of course, mating 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 on paying attention to females 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. She rode around on G-scale train tracks. She had a little video camera and a microphone on board. She was fairly primitive and she's a little bit chesty with a bit of a train wreck, so we call her Anna Nicole. We're crashing through a pyramid which I have on video. But this is a little bit of the video we collected with the onboard robot camera. The second generation of robots survive like this in the mail. This is what they sent me. It looked like a sort of escaped rotisserie chicken. The next phase looks like an angry S&M escape rotisserie chicken. It's a little hard to describe, but I brought that phase up here on the stage. Today was welcome to come up and check it out afterwards. And then I dressed them up to look like a real bird using skins from the Game of Fish freezer to get turned into his road kills, etc. And this is the finished product. So this is the next generation. She rides around on pretty early badass tires there and... She's got some skills. She can do some things besides looking around and look back and forth. She can also look... She can imitate behaviors that are important to female stage routes. So the first behavior is just looking at really not all that interested in dating. And then females forage when they're moving around the lack. She's basically just pecking at the ground foraging, cruising around the lack. That's what females do when they're getting all that interested in dating any time in the near future. And then kind of upright looking around to pay attention to what the males are doing. And so we can ride her around to where we need her to be along the way. Alright, so back to Dick. That's just to refresh ourselves on what we know is important in mating. We know that sexy stage routes show the word card, they're not scabby. They have lots of other hints around and they sound good. So what else have we found is about social intelligence. So just to again summarize in very general terms what kinds of things we found and who are key results. First we found the 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 hands are close. And this is when hands are really assessing males' play rates. So this is what matters the most influencing the female's decision. And then by doing so they show no trade-off between quality and quality. So they save their energy and they can put on a really good show when it's most likely to influence the female's 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 a decent robot in they don't have anything left. So they enter a really crappy show. So if we were to then summarize this for some sort of take-home message that might function as dating advice for the sage brows or something like this. Don't dance like no one is allowed. Okay? So the next thing we found is a different study, still being penalized. But we found that successful males save their energy by investing more portrait effort in females who show signs of being interested in copulating. So basically these successful males date with his friends. Just don't waste. They don't spend much time on females that don't look actually interested in dating. And this is why it's dangerous to take dating advice from sage brows. We're trying to do a dating advice from sage brows. Because really, that's not advice I want to give right there. But in case anyone is even thinking about taking that advice, I would remind you, you are not a sage brows. But evolution is not an excuse. And don't be a dick. So just to wrap up then, you probably know the sage brows in the news a lot lately. Hopefully you've seen sage brows 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 missing decision. A decision about whether they end up on the endangered species list in September or October of this year. Unless of course, how Republicans can stop it by adding riders onto spending bills when they're trying to just prevent the decision from actually being funded. And they probably won't stop it but they're trying. The most recent attempt is amazing. It's arguing that Congress must act to protect military readiness because protecting sage brows could hurt the military. So it may seem like in the midst of these conservation concerns and threats to our very national security caused by sage brows that the studying courtship behavior is a little less enteric and I know I don't need to defend basic science every night, right? 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 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 in evolutionary and being a biology for decades. People have been studying these guys just to cover for 1932 major magazine with a sage brows 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 and how sexual selection works how letting me evolve and we talk about lots of different reasons why it would be terrible if the species 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 absolutely 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 Christian environments so their natural reproductive behaviors so that when those environments change like this bird here who is the last bird remaining on the left of the natural gas field but the other side of the Wind River range mountains where I work were surrounded by natural gas driving rates so we understand how these kinds of land use changes are going to come back to the sage brows 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 grids which is huge and widespread and I've got a lot of work in my lab looking at the impact of this kind of development on sage brows breeding behaviors looking at noise pollution and acts on the sounds and other aspects of their reproduction that connects really strongly with the basic behavioral research that we've done and it's not just natural gas and fossil fuels it's also solar energy and wind energy also breeding energy as well as other kinds of land use changes that have been happening for generations already so as the need for conservation actually becomes even more acute there's more need than ever for both basic and applied science to understand and protect this remark of the word not just for David of course and so with that I just want to say thank you to all these light sources and by the time I'm happy to take any questions