Darryl Gwynne

Who they are

Press coverage of the 2011 Ig Nobel Prizes describes Gwynne as a professor in the biology department of the University of Toronto Mississauga. He wrote the note with the Australian entomologist David Rentz, and the observations were made during fieldwork in Western Australia. The Ig Nobel Prizes are given by the humour magazine Annals of Improbable Research and aim to make people laugh and then make them think. Gwynne said he was honoured, and that the pair had waited over twenty years for the call.

What the note reports is that males of the jewel beetle Julodimorpha bakewelli went for brown beer bottles known as stubbies. According to the press account, the beetles responded to stubbies and not to cans or to wine bottles of a slightly different shade, the beer inside did not matter, and the dimpled base of the bottle may resemble a female's wing covers in the way it reflects light. The authors also argued that discarded bottles could disrupt the beetles' mating, and that the case supports sexual selection theory, since eager males sometimes make mating mistakes.

Key papers

Gwynne, D. T., & Rentz, D. C. F. (1983). Beetles on the bottle: Male buprestids mistake stubbies for females (Coleoptera). Australian Journal of Entomology, 22(1), 79-80. doi:10.1111/j.1440-6055.1983.tb01846.x. The details about cans and wine bottles on this page come from press coverage of the Ig Nobel award, not from the note's text.

Key ideas

The note is cited on this site as a second instance of the pattern behind the supernormal stimulus, alongside Tinbergen and Perdeck's herring gull chicks. The pattern is a response tuned to a cue, plus a manufactured object that matches the cue so well that it wins. This page makes no claim about the authors' wider work, which was not reviewed.

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