kingsnake.com gallery photo by Eve
In the animal kingdom, just like the disco, the flashiest males often have more luck attracting a mate but when your predators hunt by sight, this makes them more of a target according to a new study published in Ecology and Evolution. Using models that replicated the coloration of male and female lizards, they found that the male lizard models were less well camouflaged and more likely to fall prey to bird attacks.

"In females, selection seems to have favoured better camouflage to avoid attack from avian predators. But in males, being bright and conspicuous also appears to be important even though this heightens the risk of being spotted by birds," Kate Marshall, University of Cambridge

Using visual modelling, Marshall and her colleagues tested around 300 color variations to find ones that matched the male and female colors in order to make the 600 clay lizards used in the study. They placed models in ten sites on each of the two islands and checked them every 24 hours over five days to see which had been attacked by birds.

Read more at: http://phys.org