Cathleen O’GradyEcologists love to study blue tits. The birds readily nest in boxes in the wild and have striking plumage that seems ideal for testing ideas about the evolutionary point of the ornamentation.
Dozens of studies have reported that male coloring is substantially different from that of females, that females choose mates based on differences in that coloring, and that male plumage is a signal of mate quality.But Tim Parker, an ecologist at Whitman College, wasn’t so sure.
In a 2013 meta-analysis of 48 studies on blue tit plumage, Parker found many researchers had cherry-picked the strongest findings from data they had sliced and diced.