Identifying a Suitable Mate:
Of course, to successfully reproduce, you can’t very well attempt to mate with every animal of the opposite sex that you happen to encounter. That would
not be an effective reproductive strategy, to say the least. Therefore, it’s vitally important to make sure that your potential mate is of the
same species. Not surprisingly, then, animals have evolved various means of indicating the species to which they belong.
Before we discuss some of those adaptations, it’s worth considering which sex is the one that has the most to lose by making a poor choice when selecting a mate. If the members of one sex have more to lose from choosing an unsuitable partner, you’d expect selection to favor more “choosy” behavior on the part of that sex. This indeed seems to be the case.