Question: Why do animals have to have a courting ritual or a dance to get each others attention?

Sam Tazzyman answered on 14 Jun 2011:

Well, not all animals do. It depends on the species. There are lots of examples of species which don’t have courting rituals or dances. For example, lions do not have a courting ritual. What happens instead is that they mate any time of the year: a pride of lions (pride is the name for a group of lions) is usually made up of 5 or 6 female lions (who are usually sisters) and 1-3 male lions (who are often brothers with each other but not brothers to the female lions). They will mate and have young, and eventually another group of male lions will come along and fight off the males in the pride and take their place, and then once again mate and have young.

But you are right that there are also lots of examples of animals that do have courting rituals or dances. I don’t think scientists have established too many general rules about why some species have courting rituals and some don’t – usually it depends on the circumstances of the species. An example is Birds of Paradise. In this species the males have amazing plumage and dance rituals – you can see them on youtube such as here:

and lots of other videos on there. These birds are closely related but all the different species have very different looking males. One of the reasons that they could evolve such elaborate mating dances is because they live in Papua New Guinea. There are no foxes or badgers or wolves there, and so the birds could evolve the dances without getting eaten. Here in the UK such dances couldn’t evolve because any male birds that tried such a thing would be very likely to be eaten.

As for why males have to do a courting ritual at all, scientists are not entirely sure. We know that the reason the males do such rituals is because the females must be more likely to mate with males that do the dances. But we don’t know for sure why females prefer dancing males. There are several theories. One says that maybe there is some reason why to start with the flashy males get slightly more matings, and then after that the effect snowballs, because females who mate with flashy males have more grandchildren because the sons of the females are flashy and thus more attractive. Another theory says that by doing the dance and being flashy, the males are showing that they have good genes, because only males with good genes would be able to do such a dance. Another theory says that the dances show that the males don’t have parasites or diseases, again because ill males wouldn’t be able to do the dance. The tricky thing is that all of these explanations could be right – it doesn’t have to be one or the other. And maybe in some species one explanation is more appropriate than in others.

I hope that helps explain it – it’s a good question, and difficult for scientists to answer!