Our Greater Honeyguides killing their Little Bee-eater hosts star in the ‘Sex, Lies and Dirty Tricks’ episode of BBC Natural History Unit’s “World’s Sneakiest Animals” TV series, presented by Chris Packham. The first broadcast is at 20h00 on 14 January 2015, on BBC Two. The Natural History Unit team visited us in Zambia in October 2014 to film, ably facilitated in the field by Jeroen Koorevaar and Nicholas Horrocks.
New paper on imperfect egg mimicry
Our paper “Combined measures of mimetic fidelity explain imperfect mimicry in a brood parasite-host system” has just been published in the journal Biology Letters. This study was led by Tanmay Dixit, and carried out together with Gary Choi, Salem al-Mosleh, Jess Lund, Jolyon Troscianko, Collins Moya, L Mahadevan, and Claire Spottiswoode, as part of a collaboration between our group and Prof. Mahadevan and his lab at Harvard University. Together we combined mathematical tools and field experiments in Zambia to quantify a key difference – “squiggle” markings – between the eggs of hosts (tawny-flanked prinias) and parasites (cuckoo finches). We showed that suboptimal behaviour on the part of prinias allows cuckoo finches to get by with an imperfect copy of prinia eggs.