Luke McClean has been awarded a two-year Leverhulme Study Abroad Studentship to carry out MSc research on coevolutionary interactions between lesser honeyguides and their hosts in Zambia, based at the FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology at the University of Cape Town. Luke is a graduate of Queens University, Belfast, and has spent the last two field seasons ably assisting with our work in Zambia. We’re delighted that he’ll be back. Congratulations Luke, and thank you to The Leverhulme Trust for their wonderful support once again. Grants from The Leverhulme Trust also support Gabriel Jamie‘s and Nicholas Horrocks‘s research in Zambia. Thank you!
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.