hi everyone and welcome to learn a novel by og for free with mr. ik in this video I'm going to be going through courtship rituals so festival me courtship behavior is essential for successful mating between organisms of the same species and for them to be able to recognize that they are members of the same species so thinking back to what is a species it's a group of similar organisms that are able to breed to make fertile offspring and species have to be able to reproduce with members of the same species to make fertile offspring so they can pass on their DNA their advantageous alleles to make sure that the entire species continues to survive so that's one of the key reasons why courtship is so important it's not to help one individual to survive it's for the survival of the entire species so what actually our course of rituals them so they could be a range of different sequences of actions and the sequence of actions that the animals perform is unique to each species and because their sequence of behaviors is unique each species that is how they're able to identify that they are animals and members of the same species say number one the caustic rituals are normally performed by males that's why often in the animal kingdom the male's do display more brightly colored feathers compared to the females so you can see that here in these two ducts the male has got far more colors compared to the female and that's because the male is responsible for the courtship ritual and attracting at the female so as I said includes a sequence of actions and that could be a sequence of dance moves it could be different sounds releasing of two chemicals so pheromones which are chemicals to attract the opposite sex it could be displaying the colorful feathers that we see in the peacock at the top here and some animals it could be fighting to display strength I'd highly recommend if you want to see some of these sequences the birds-of-paradise have amazing courtship rituals if you go on YouTube and just search for some birds of paradise courtship rituals there's quite a few good ones that David Attenborough has narrated so definitely gonna have a look at those are hilarious there's one that doesn't Michael Jackson walk this one here skips and skids along the branch but they're great have a look so the females will then observe the courtship ritual and if they recognize that sequence of event number one that means they know it is a male it's a male of the same species and then they decide is that courtship ritual good enough for them to want to mate with them and the reason that the female chooses is they might have limited eggs they might only be in mating season for a short period of time so they have to select the male that displays the best ritual to indicate they are the fittest so that leads us on to the importance of these courtship rituals so number one is to ensure successful reproduction and there's a few subheadings with in acts so we've got number one it enables them to recognize their own species so that's what we were saying before the fact that it's a particular sequence of dances or sounds which is unique to each species allows them to recognize it it's the same species and the opposite sex number two in the successful reproduction is that it synchronizes mating behavior now what we mean by that is first of all it indicates that a male and also a female is sexually mature and also in season meaning the female is currently releasing fertile eggs and that's really important because if a male and female and the same species were to reproduce if they weren't sexually mature or in season that means they're not making fertile gametes so although they might be able to mate it won't be successful reproduction and what we mean by successful reproduction is they can make and produce fertile offspring so to make sure it's gonna be successful the courtship ritual is a way to indicate that the male is sexually mature and the femur will only respond to the behavior if they are sexually mature and in season so they'll only respond and meet with the male if they are releasing fertile eggs so the next idea is and to ensure the survival of the offspring so if you do you have two individuals mating and they did successfully produce offspring courtship also helps to make sure that the offspring survives because with in some species the secondary purpose of the courtship ritual is to form a pair bond between those two individuals so if you think of penguins for example the male will present a really round smooth pebble to the female as an indication as part of the courtship ritual and that helps to form a really strong bond between them so that the male and the female stay together and raise the offspring and in some species having two parents really increases the chances of that offspring being out survive which is the case of penguins so it means one of the parents can stay and look after the offspring keep them warm while the other goes to fine feet final reason is indicates they're really strong and healthy because if it's a bird with the brightest color feathers in the best condition it means they've got extra energy to go towards their appearance rather than maybe fighting off infection so the final thing to caution rituals is how you can study them to look at how closely related different species are so the more similar a courtship sequence is between two different species the more closely related the species are so I've got an example here we've got three abduct species we've got duck one duck two ducks three there's three different species and we've got their sequence in their courtship so Duk Hwan shake the tail shakes the beak nods and swims and then turns to the female duck to shake tail shake beep flicks head then turns the female duck three shapes the tail whistles grunts raised his head and tail and then turns to the female so what this shows us is duck one and two are more closely related because they're sequence is almost identical it starts off the same first two moves it's just the third move is different whereas duck three has a very very different sequence to both of them so it's not that closely related to the other two duck species so a courtship rituals are genetically determined so that is how it indicates how closely related the species are so the more similar species sequence is to another species that tells you that their DNA base sequence must be more similar so in that is it for courtship I hope you found it helpful if you have please get them thumbs up and click subscribe to keep up to date [Music] you