Host species of brood-parasitic birds can evolve features such as spots, squiggles and colours on their eggs that act like ‘signatures’ that are difficult for parasites to forge, helping hosts to detect and reject imposter eggs. In this new paper, we show that hosts of cuckoo finches and diederik cuckoos in Zambia have optimised this defence by arranging signature traits in unpredictable combinations. Thus, egg signatures are individually distinctive and hard for parasites to mimic, helping hosts distinguish parasitic eggs from their own. The paper arose from MPhil research by Eleanor Caves (co-authored by Martin Stevens, Edwin Iversen and Claire Spottiswoode) and the data were all obtained from Major John Colebrook-Robjent‘s wonderful egg collection. It is available open access in Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B.
New paper published on Weber’s Law and mimicry
Our paper ‘Why and how to apply Weber’s Law to coevolution and mimicry’ has been published in the journal Evolution. This perspectives paper, written by Tanmay Dixit, Eleanor Caves, Claire Spottiswoode, and Nicholas Horrocks, argues that Weber’s Law of proportional processing can lead to otherwise counterintuitive predictions about the evolutionary trajectories of mimicry systems. Weber’s Law states that when the magnitude of a stimulus is large, it is more difficult to discriminate a change or difference from that stimulus. In other words, relative differences are more salient than absolute differences. We show that Weber’s Law could have implications for mimicry: when stimulus magnitudes are high, it should be more difficult to discriminate a model from a mimic. This leads to testable predictions about evolutionary trajectories of models and mimics. We also present a framework for testing Weber’s Law and its implications for coevolution.