New honeyguide paper published

Aug 10, 2013

Honeyguides and other brood parasitic birds are famous for tricking host parents by laying eggs that mimic their own. Honeyguide eggs mimic host eggs in size yet, surprisingly, bee-eater hosts are undiscriminating and readily accept mismatched eggs. This study shows that honeyguide egg size adaptation has probably rather evolved to trick other honeyguides, not host parents: honeyguides selectively puncture any mismatched egg already present in the nest when they lay their own, lest it be the offspring of another honeyguide female and brutally kill their own chick when it hatches.
Read the full paper in Biology Letters [Open Access], or Ed Yong’s excellent article about the study. Here are some other nice articles and podcasts online covering this study: The Behaviour, Ecology & Evolution Podcast | Take Part blog | Earth Times.

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Chima Nwaogu presents research lecture at Uppsala University, Sweden

Dr Chima Nwaogu visited the Animal Ecology Unit at the Evolutionsbiologisk centrum (EBC) at Uppsala University, Sweden, to present the 2025 Christer Hemborg lecture. He gave a research lecture on why Afrotropical birds breed when they do, based on analyses of breeding records derived from Major John Colebrook-Robjent’s egg collection currently held at the Livingstone Museum. He explored how the effects of pre-rain tree green-up and rainfall onset differentially drive invertebrate and grass seed abundance, influencing multiple seasonal bird breeding patterns throughout the year.

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