Question: with your work how exaculy do you find out what they think is sexy?

Sam Tazzyman answered on 13 Jun 2011:

This is a great question. It is very hard to find out what animals find attractive in lots of cases. However, with careful experiments, scientists can show that females prefer some things. For example, my boss works on stalk-eyed flies:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalk-eyed_fly

These bizarre creatures have their eyes out on stalks coming off their head. In most species the males have bigger eyestalks than the females, and when scientists give females a choice between two males, they most often will choose to mate with the male that has the larger eyestalks.

So it depends on the species as to what you do to find out what animals think is sexy, but mainly the answer is through careful experiments, giving females choices between males and recording which ones they choose to mate with.