zlacker

I recall reading about a certain species of birds where, to impress the females, the males dives to the ground. The closer to the ground before they pull out of the dive the more impressive.

The scientist found there was a gene encoding how daring a bird would be, mostly clustered in two groups IIRC. But there was a rare variant which made them much more fearless, causing them to go much lower than the others.

However they only found birds with one copy of that variation. Turned out if a bird inherited the variant from both parents, they never pulled out of the dive and smacked into the ground, killing the bird.

These crazy free solo climbs and similar reminds me of those birds.