Vivek Sridhar, UW Biology Assistant Professor, was recently featured in two media pieces on his research on lekking behavior. From a Darwinian viewpoint, life is about surviving long enough to reproduce. Across the animal kingdom, many systems have evolved for males and females to find and attract suitable mates. Lekking—in which males gather in a single area to court visiting females—is a spectacular and rare example of such a mating system. 

In the following short film, Vivek talks about  Project MELA (Mating Ecology of Lek Breeding Antelope), an interdisciplinary research initiative supported by the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and the Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behavior at the University of Konstanz.

Vivek was also interviewed on the "In the Swarm" podcast on the visually spectacular and extremely rare mating phenomenon that is called 'lekking'.