Superb lyrebirds hold a territory of several cleared display mounds and court females with a tightly synced dance-and-song routine — this lab treats that as an honest-signalling trade-off rather than an animation loop. Each instant, a weighted attraction score is computed from three sliders (weights sum to 100):
S = 40·rhythm + 35·(intensity·energy/100) + 25·court
if rival present: S *= (1 − 0.3)
Effective display intensity is scaled by the current energy reserve, which follows its own balance each frame — display costs energy, resting recovers it:
dE/dt = −c1·(intensity/100)^1.5 + c2·(1 − intensity/100)
Every step, a female may arrive with a Poisson-thinned probability driven by a logistic mate-choice function of the score, p = 1/(1+e^(−0.12·(S−50))); once she approaches, acceptance is drawn from a second logistic test on the score at that moment. Independently, rivals intrude at a rate you set; whether the resident male repels an intrusion or is displaced depends on whether his energy reserve is above a fatigue threshold at the moment of the contest — so a male who displays flat-out attracts more visits but has less energy left to defend the court when a rival shows up.
- Court scene — the cleared display mound, tail-fan wedge (sized by effective intensity), approaching females and intruding rivals.
- Score strip — the attraction score S over the last window, so you can see rival intrusions and energy fatigue pull it down in real time.
- Energy reserve — clamped 0–100%; verified numerically to settle at a stable equilibrium for a fixed intensity, confirming the ODE integration is sound.