This is Scientific Americans 60 Second Science. I'm Jason Goldman.

One of the most impressive scenes in the world of birds is a peacock displaying its impressive

iridescent feathers, technically known as its train.

While the female pea hen looks on, the peacock spreads his train out and ruffles it back and

forth as the sun highlights the red, blue, and green within the feathers.

But these iconic trains are only half the story of how the boys impressed the ladies.

Both male and female peafowls sport crests on their heads, small feathers that stick straight up like a Mohawk.

The crest feathers that actually give the peacocks their Latin name, they're called

Pavo Cristatus, the crested pheasant.

And so I was intrigued by the fact that people didn't really know what the function of these

crests were.

Haverford College physicist Suzanne Kane.

A biologist might see those feathers and assume they are visual signals, but as a physicist, Kane had a different idea.

We were curious in my laboratory about whether the preferred vibrational properties of the

crest feathers might by any chance agree with the preferred vibrational

properties of this train rattling display that the males do.

So Kane and her colleagues exposed crest feathers from preserved dead peafowl

to simulated displays of male and female social behaviors, like wing shaking and train rattling.

And so we were just gobs back to find out that in fact they did agree.

What all that means is that the Pefowl's head crests are specifically tunes to the vibrations produced by the

train rattling of its own species. The crests thus act like a sort of special antenna,

meant to pick up a single kind of sound. The findings are in the journal

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