New paper on range changes in hosts and brood parasites

May 15, 2016

Africa’s vegetation is changing fast, owing to climate change and other results of human activities. How does this affect the distributions of interacting species such as brood parasites and their hosts? In this paper using data from the South African Bird Atlas Project, we show that parasites largely track changes in their hosts’ distributions, and that changing species distributions can set the stage for new potential host-parasite interactions between indigobirds and their hosts. Read more in the original paper by Guillaume Péron, Res AltweggGabriel Jamie and Claire Spottiswoodeavailable open access in Journal of Animal Ecology.

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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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