September 16, 2014 — There's an old adage that warns against passing judgment based on appearance, but female bluefin killifish, like many animal species, apparently don't share such human wisdom when choosing a mate. Researchers at the New York University Polytechnic School of Engineering found that female killifish tend to prefer males with a specific fin color: yellow. The preference for yellow was surprising given prior experiments by other groups.
The reason may lie in the engineering-based, repeatable approach taken by the researchers. They substituted the notoriously erratic live male bluefin killifish with replicas that were controlled by a robotics-based platform.
Maurizio Porfiri, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, led the team, which included collaborators from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where the experiments were conducted. Porfiri has long used biomimetic robotic models to understand animal behavior, particularly that of fish, and his experiments demonstrate the validity of deploying robots as controllable stimuli amid live animal counterparts.
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