Do people flirt like guppies?
By Susan Milius
From Atlanta, Ga., at the annual meeting of the Animal Behavior Society
A complexity of flirtation, known as mate copying, may be common to both guppies and college students.
Typically, female guppies go for the orangest males, explains Lee A. Dugatkin of the University of Louisville in Kentucky. Yet he’s found that a female chooses a not-so-orange mate if other females seem to have fallen for him.
Dugatkin and his colleagues have now performed what they say is the first test for such mate copying in people.