| great bowerbirds create theaters with forced perspective when seen by their audience. | birds in the infraorder corvida [1] (ravens, jays, bowerbirds) are renowned for their cognitive abilities [2-4], which include advanced problem solving with spatial inference [4-8], tool use and complex constructions [7-10], and bowerbird cognitive ability is associated with mating success [11]. great bowerbird males construct bowers with a long avenue from within which females view the male displaying over his bower court [10]. this predictable audience viewpoint is a prerequisite for forced (a ... | 2010 | 20832314 |
| decoration supplementation and male-male competition in the great bowerbird (ptilonorhynchus nuchalis): a test of the social control hypothesis. | many animals use signals to communicate their social status to conspecifics, and the social control hypothesis suggests that social interactions maintain the evolutionary stability of status signals: low-quality individuals signal at a low level to prevent high-quality individuals from "punishing" them. i examined whether the numbers of decorations at bowers are socially controlled in the great bowerbird (ptilonorhynchus nuchalis). in two populations, i supplemented males with decorations to det ... | 2010 | 20976291 |
| illusions promote mating success in great bowerbirds. | sexual selection studies normally compare signal strengths, but signal components and sensory processing may interact to create misleading or attention-capturing illusions. visual illusions can be produced by altering object and scene geometry in ways that trick the viewer when seen from a particular direction. male great bowerbirds actively maintain size-distance gradients of objects on their bower courts that create forced-perspective illusions for females viewing their displays from within th ... | 2012 | 22267812 |
| comment on "illusions promote mating success in great bowerbirds". | kelley and endler (reports, 20 january 2012, p. 335) claim that male great bowerbirds construct a visual illusion, using display object gradients, that affects mating success. we argue that they provide inadequate statistical support for their hypothesis, inappropriately exclude important data, and do not consider other display traits that explain mating success. we propose a more plausible alternative hypothesis to explain display object patterns. | 2012 | 22822134 |
| bowerbirds, art and aesthetics: are bowerbirds artists and do they have an aesthetic sense? | male bowerbirds create and decorate a structure called a bower which serves only to attract females for mating, and females visit and choose one among many bower owners before deciding which male to mate with. is what they do art, and do they have an aesthetic sense? i propose operational definitions of art, judgement, and an aesthetic sense which depend upon communication theory which allow one to get explicit answers to this question. by these definitions great bowerbirds are artists, judge ar ... | 2012 | 22896793 |
| male great bowerbirds create forced perspective illusions with consistently different individual quality. | males often produce elaborate displays that increase their attractiveness to females, and some species extend their displays to include structures or objects that are not part of their body. such "extended phenotypes" may communicate information that cannot be transmitted by bodily signals or may provide a more reliable signal than bodily signals. however, it is unclear whether these signals are individually distinct and whether they are consistent over long periods of time. male bowerbirds cons ... | 2012 | 23213203 |
| visual effects in great bowerbird sexual displays and their implications for signal design. | it is often assumed that the primary purpose of a male's sexual display is to provide information about quality, or to strongly stimulate prospective mates, but other functions of courtship displays have been relatively neglected. male great bowerbirds (ptilonorhynchus nuchalis) construct bowers that exploit the female's predictable field of view (fov) during courtship displays by creating forced perspective illusions, and the quality of illusion is a good predictor of mating success. here, we p ... | 2014 | 24695430 |
| how do great bowerbirds construct perspective illusions? | many animals build structures to provide shelter, avoid predation, attract mates or house offspring, but the behaviour and potential cognitive processes involved during building are poorly understood. great bowerbird (ptilinorhynchus nuchalis) males build and maintain display courts by placing tens to hundreds of objects in a positive size-distance gradient. the visual angles created by the gradient create a forced perspective illusion that females can use to choose a mate. although the quality ... | 2017 | 28280568 |
| functional characterization of spectral tuning mechanisms in the great bowerbird short-wavelength sensitive visual pigment (sws1), and the origins of uv/violet vision in passerines and parrots. | one of the most striking features of avian vision is the variation in spectral sensitivity of the short wavelength sensitive (sws1) opsins, which can be divided into two sub-types: violet- and uv- sensitive (vs & uvs). in birds, uvs has been found in both passerines and parrots, groups that were recently shown to be sister orders. while all parrots are thought to be uvs, recent evidence suggests some passerine lineages may also be vs. the great bowerbird (chlamydera nuchalis) is a passerine nota ... | 2013 | 24499383 |
| a comparative study of rhodopsin function in the great bowerbird (ptilonorhynchus nuchalis): spectral tuning and light-activated kinetics. | rhodopsin is the visual pigment responsible for initiating the phototransduction cascade in vertebrate rod photoreceptors. although well-characterized in a few model systems, comparative studies of rhodopsin function, particularly for nonmammalian vertebrates are comparatively lacking. bowerbirds are rare among passerines in possessing a key substitution, d83n, at a site that is otherwise highly conserved among g protein-coupled receptors. while this substitution is present in some dim-light ada ... | 2016 | 26889650 |