Jo Setchell

And initially, I did discover that the pinup animal, the most colorful animal, has the highest testosterone, is the highest ranking.

And I thought, oh, yeah, so I'm really figuring out something here.

He's probably the most important.

And females do like to hang around the most colorful animal.

but there are many other things that come into it too.

So there is his color.

There's also how nice he is.

So if a male is brightly colored, but horrible, females are just not interested.

And it turned out much later, when I alluded to their genetics, what they're really interested in is genes, and it's got nothing to do with the colour.

Males and females.

So males are incredibly colourful, so we focus on that.

But if you didn't look at a male mandrill and you just saw a female mandrill, you'd notice that she was very pretty and very pink-coloured.

So pink nose, blue facial stripes, very pretty.

It's both.

So yes, females definitely choose.

Females have the advantage of being much smaller than males, which means that they can get around a lot more easily.

I've seen males mate guarding a tree, thinking that their female is up the tree when the female has jumped out of the tree about 10 minutes ago and has run down, jumped into another tree, run down, run out of sight and turns up later with another male.

I'm a female primatologist, so, yeah, that's the conclusion.

So mandrills don't have that problem because their tail is only a few inches long.

Immune genes, so the strength of the immune system, but not actually that.