In a new paper published in Ecology Letters, Michigan State University evolutionary biologist Janette Boughman shows that the process of choosing a mate could be very important to the survival of the species. To do this, she and co-author Maria Servedio introduce a new theoretical model they coin “The Ecological Stage.”

Mate selection and male display traits have been studied before, but no previous speciation model could fully explain why males have such diverse displays (e.g., bright plumes on birds or striking colors on fish) and why females are attracted to males with distinctly different displays. Boughman believed answering these questions could be evolutionarily significant to the concept of speciation, the formation of new species. She teamed up with Servedio, a theoretician from the University of North Carolina, to build and test a new model.