When should a ground-nesting bird, protected only by its own camouflage, flee its nest to save itself from an approaching predator? In this study we show that nesting nightjars, plovers and coursers in Zambia time their escape from a threat depending on how well camouflaged their eggs and their own bodies are. Read more in an article about the study in Science Daily, or in the original paper by Jared Wilson-Aggarwal, Jolyon Troscianko, Martin Stevens and Claire Spottiswoode, available open access in The American Naturalist.
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.