When Researchers Experimentally Altered Tail Lengths of Male Widow Birds

question 29

Essay

When researchers experimentally altered tail lengths of male widow birds (Euplectes progne), they found that females chose males with longer tails even when tail length did not correlate with any tangible benefit to a male's ability to defend territory. What are two possible reasons that females prefer longer tails?

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Definitions:

Independent Variables

Variables in an experiment or statistical model that are manipulated or categorized to determine their effect on dependent variables without being affected by any other variable in the model.

Homoscedasticity

A term in statistics describing a situation where all random variables across a dataset have the same finite variance.

Normality Of Errors

An assumption in many statistical models that the errors in the predictions are normally distributed.

Independence Of Errors

Pertains to a condition in statistical analyses where the errors of a model’s predictions are not correlated with each other.