Tanmay Dixit has commenced his PhD research on egg mimicry in the Cuckoo Finch and egg rejection behaviour by their hosts (family Cisticolidae). He plans to use approaches from applied mathematics, visual ecology and psychology to understand how hosts recognise eggs, and the implications for this on host egg phenotypes and parasite mimicry. This Cuckoo Finch chick, held by Tanmay above, was clearly a successful mimic!
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.