Grouse in search of spouse
Houston Zoo working to make a love connection for Attwater’s prairie chickens
Love isn’t always easy.
With more than 7.5 billion people in the world, the search for “The One” can feel overwhelming. But that human luxury of seemingly infinite choice is nothing compared to the pressure placed upon endangered species like the Attwater’s prairie chicken — the survival of which depends completely on pairing off with ideal partners to reproduce in large numbers.
To solve this problem, scientists at the Houston Zoo have turned to the same solution humans have tapped as the best way to meet a mate: online dating.
“It’s like Match.com for chickens,” said the zoo’s curator of birds and animal records, Hannah Bailey, as she explained the zoo’s algorithm for identifying optimal
reproductive matches for Attwater’s prairie chickens. The native Texas birds have been pushed to the brink in recent decades. There are two culprits for this: a loss of habitat and an increasing population of fire ants, which act as both a predator for young chicks and a competing predator of the small bugs the chickens like to eat.
Enter chicken love algorithms. For humans, online dating became the most popular way for spouses-to-be to meet each other in 2017. And as people swipe their way through Valentine’s Day, why should humans have all the fun? While Bailey likens her process to Match.com, an oldie-but-goodie in the online dating world, it’s actually more similar to the nascent app Bumble, which sells itself as a dating platform that puts the ball in the woman’s court from the get-go.
“With these birds, it’s a female-choice situation, completely,” Bailey explained. “In the spring, all the boys get together in an open area on the prairie, and the girls kind of hide back in the grass, and the males do what’s called a booming display.”
That’s the mating dance. The prospective suitors inflate brightly colored air sacs on the sides of their necks, as they stomp their feet manically and whoopwhoop loudly to tell the other male birds to back off. The dance is so captivating that scientists took it into consideration when naming the bird: Its Latin title, Tympanuchus cupido attwateri, translates to “Cupid of the prairie” in English. Talk about a lover. “The girls just kind of stand there and look, and see what man’s the best,” Bailey said. “I kind of liken it to a high school football game, where the guys are all making a fool of themselves somewhere, and the girls are just kind of standing back and watching.”
But here’s the thing about limited populations: Scientists can’t just let these female birds decide which male looks the best all on their own, lest they risk inbreeding and other damage to the gene pool.
And the Attwater’s prairie chicken population is about as limited as it gets. In the early 1900s, the bird had a population of around a million around the Texas coastal prairie and into Louisiana. But habitat loss forced the population down to 1,000 birds — all in Texas — by 1967, earning the grouse the endangered species distinction. While the Houston Zoo has been working to breed these birds since 1993, status as prey rather than predator has forced numbers to a critically low amount: Only about 200 live in the wild currently, despite the fact that the Houston Zoo released 224 last year.
The stakes for a love connection couldn’t be higher.
Around this time every year, the zoo’s supervisor of birds, Mollie Coym, creates an intricate breeding matrix that sorts through each of the breedable birds’ genetic information, looking for pairings between male and female birds that are unrelated at best, and third cousins at worst. (Roosevelts and royal family is the general rule of thumb.)
“The matrix tells us who we can breed with who,” said Coym, who follows a color-coded system for peak pairing: Yellow for ideal matches. Purple for “OK, but we’d prefer not to.” Gray for “That’s a bad match. Do not pair!”
On the last day of this month, Coym will place the pairings in breeding pens for the beginning of the spring breeding season, which runs from March to June, and usually yields two batches of eggs per hen. And in a perfect world, eggs would start being fertilized in every pen, immediately. But as anyone who’s ever had a lousy Tinder date can attest to, algorithms aren’t perfect.
“The program tells us what the best genetic matches are. But that does not always mean that when we introduce those two together, she’ll think he’s all that great,” said Bailey. “So we have to look at not only who she’s best genetically paired with, but we have to make sure the boys on either side of her — and across the hall — are genetic matches, too. Because sometimes, the male will be booming and displaying in her pen, but she’ll just be walking along the side, looking at the guy next door longingly.”
While the zoo has worked on pairing these birds for 25 years, it’s still a mystery as to what makes for a highly desired male bird. Is it about the color of the air sacs? A thick set of eyebrows? A couple years ago, a massive bird the zoologists affectionately referred to as Frankenchicken won the hearts of countless chicks. Could it have been his size?
“Different hens like different things,” Bailey said. As is a woman’s prerogative. “If they’re not breeding, we can look at their genetics and see if we want to re-pair them,” said Coym. “But if they’re laying fertile eggs with the man they already have, we won’t do anyoptions thing.”
A bird in the hand, as they say.
Despite the fact that the Attwater’s prairie chicken is one of the rarest animals at the zoo, its breeding program has more than many other pairings. Just think of how long a zoo has to sit on a waiting list for a breeding mate for a panda or a tiger.
“Because of the scale of this program, we have the benefit of having other males we can pair with females who might be uninterested in their current male,” said Bailey. “But there’s a zoo problem, where you have animals that — on paper — look like they should be together, and then there’s nothing there, and a lot of times, the females will be like, ‘You know, I like him, but I don’t like-like him.’ We’re lucky we have the benefit of having multiple pairs.”
And really, it’s not a life-altering decision for the female chickens. While they take one partner at a time, the Attwater’s prairie chicken isn’t a species that mates for life. In the wild, after mating, the male would just mosey along to his next destination, while the female would build a nest and incubate her eggs on her own for 26 days.
In captivity though, an awkward match can lead to an awkward few months.
“Because we keep the males and females together, the males just boom all day long. They’re at the front of the pens just booming and booming and booming,” said Bailey. “In the wild, the female mates, then builds her nest and has her peace and quiet. So I often think that toward the end of the breeding season, all the hens have that look in their eye of, ‘I wish you would just shut up.’ ”
Ah, love.