Out in the wild, animals will do anything they can to find a mate. They’ll fight for them, scream to attract them, and — as a new study on hummingbirds shows – lie to them.
The study, written by researchers at the University of California, says that male Costa’s hummingbirds, who “dance” to attract female attention, purposely manipulate the sound they make when they execute a dive, making it appear that they are faster fliers than they really are.
It’s basically the hummingbird equivalent of photoshopping your Tinder profile. Since female hummingbirds are impressed by fast fliers, the males who can fake speed have a better shot at making a match.

The study gives us just a tiny glimpse into the world of hummingbirds — a word we know surprisingly little about, according to biologist Christopher Clark, the study’s lead author.
“People love hummingbirds and the displays are fantastic and eye catching,” Clark told Gizmodo. “But we just don’t know a lot about them.”
The scientists studied the movement of the males by using a wind tunnel to create a spatial model of the variations in dive sounds.

According to Clark, the key to understanding this behaviour begins not with the males, but with the females and their preferences. After all, since the females get the final say in mate selection, their personal predilections are ultimately what drive the male behaviour.
Eventually, Clark hopes to do further studies to help us understand just what it is that females are looking for in a mate.
“What’s going on inside the females’ head is just a interesting is what the males are doing.”
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