Question: How do you use maths in your research to find out what animals find sexy?

Sam Tazzyman answered on 13 Jun 2011:

I study evolution, which is about how things change very gradually over time. Mathematics is a good way to keep track of these things. An example is some work I have done on poisonous frogs that live on islands off the coast of Panama. Each island has a different colour of frog, but they are all the same species. I wanted to find out why they are different colours on each island. Using mathematics I could write down rules for how many frogs there were of each colour, and how likely the frogs of each colour would be to survive and breed. Then I can see how the different populations of frogs could end up being a different colour. What starts out as tiny differences in average colour between each island becomes larger and larger over time, especially if females are choosy about what colour males they fancy. And its by using maths that we can understand this process, because maths is great for being able to keep track of tiny changes over long periods of time.