The streaky-breasted flufftail is a highly enigmatic and skulking tiny migratory rail species that lives in the flooded grassy ‘dambos’ of our Zambian study area. In a new article, Gabriel Jamie and our chief field assistants Collins Moya and Lazaro Hamusikili describe for the first time its breeding behaviour in the wild, including startling nest defence against a snake that came to eat its eggs. Download their original article in Bulletin of the African Bird Club here.
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.