Resumen de Wings with a Snap.
This article reports that at 80 flutters per second, the male red-capped manakin's wings can beat faster than a hummingbird's. But rather than hovering for a drink, manakins generate finger-snap clicks to entice females. Kimberly Bostwick of Cornell University captured the frenetic beating with 1,000-frame-per-second cameras. The footage shows a surprising diversity in how wings generate sounds: the white-collared manakin claps its wings behind its back, but the redcapped manakin rubs its wing feathers against its tail. "When we think of sexual selection traits such as these, we think at mostly superficial changes such as a change in feather color," Bostwick says. Her findings instead reveal that the wing sounds of male courtship have led to extreme body diversification in manakin bones, muscles and feathers.
