Do peahens not prefer peacocks with more elaborate trains?

Ever since Darwin (1871), the peacock’s train has been cited as the icon of an extravagant conspicuous secondary sexual trait that has evolved through female mate choice. However, Takahashi et al. (2008) recently challenged this idea. They monitored female mate choice during 7 years in a feral peafowl, Pavo cristatus, population in Japan and found no correlation between male mating success and three morphological train traits. They concluded that ‘combined with previous results, our findings indicate that the peacock’s train is not currently the universal target of female choice’ and proposed ‘that the peacock’s train is an obsolete signal for which female preference has already been lost or weakened’ (Takahashi et al. 2008, page 1216). We feel that their conclusions are far too strong, particularly since three independent studies have found a relationship between train features and mating success (Petrie et al. 1991; Petrie & Halliday 1994; Yasmin & Yahya 1996; Loyau et al. 2005a). The purpose of this article is therefore to draw attention to alternative explanations and conclusions that are essential for the understanding of the complexity of mate choice. We first suggest some possible nonadaptive and adaptive explanations for the reported differences in female preferences in the peafowl. We then show that plasticity in mate choice is a widespread phenomenon across a large spectrum of species. Therefore, we suggest that findings based on a single