An improved method for demonstrating visual selection by wild birds

Abstract

Visual selection occurs when predators preferentially remove conspicuous varieties from prey populations and thus confer a selective advantage on inconspicuous varieties. In previous papers we have described a general method for simulating such natural selection, and we here give details of an improvement that again uses wild birds as predators, green and brown pastry ‘baits’ as prey, and trays containing coloured stones as the backgrounds. We used backgrounds of three different colours: green (on which brown baits were conspicuous), brown (on which browns were inconspicuous), and white (on which both prey types were conspicuous). The important difference from the previous design was that these backgrounds were presented simultaneously on the same bird table. We placed equal numbers of green and brown prey on each background and recorded the numbers eaten by wild birds. We did six experiments to test the design. Two different methods of measuring selection showed that the results were generally in the direction predicted from the hypothesis that conspicuous prey are more likely to be eaten by predators.