“These preferences can run away with themselves over eons of evolutionary time.”

From Bitch: What does it mean to be female? (2022), by Lucy Cooke:

“Today many scientists believe the answer to this fashionable fancy lies in the tuning of the female’s senses. A male wants to get picked, and this means standing out from the crowd and getting noticed. A sure-fire way to catch a female’s attention, it turns out, is by dressing up as her favourite food.
Female freshwater guppies from Trinidad (Poecilia reticulata) generally prefer to mate with males bearing larger, more chromatic orange spots. The origin of their preference is thought to be a sensory bias for the colour orange, which has arisen from their penchant for the bright-orange fruits of the cabrehash tree. The ripe fruits drop into their freshwater pools and are consumed voraciously, providing the fish with a vital source of sugars and protein in an otherwise barren environment. So the female guppies have a partiality for the colour orange as it directs them towards a quality food source, which males are subsequently exploiting in order to pique their interest sexually.
It seems the male satin bowerbird could be utilizing the same kind of sensory exploitation to get himself noticed.

In experimental situations, the frugivorous females repeatedly preferred blue grapes to other coloured fruit, suggesting their senses may be tuned for alert to this colour. These preferences can run away with themselves over eons of evolutionary time. With thousands of generations of females choosing blue the preference can become seriously distorted. So from a female’s fondness for blue fruit you wind up with the male bowerbird’s cobalt kleptomania and house of blue booty. It could be that the male sage grouse’s olive-green chest is the same hue as the tastiest sagebrush shoots, and his rubbery plops are simply drawing further attention to this existing sensory bias, like a dinner bell sounding for her favourite sage snack.”