Congratulations to Luke McClean on submitting his PhD thesis at the University of Cape Town, entitled ‘Coevolution between brood-parasitic honeyguides and their hosts’, based on four years of fieldwork in Zambia from 2015 to 2018 – here he is setting up a nest camera in the field together with Lazaro Hamusikili. To our knowledge this is only the second ever PhD thesis on honeyguides, after Dr Hussein Isack’s ground-breaking work at the University of Oxford in the 1980s.
Our paper “Categorical identity signatures can reduce host error rates during brood parasitism” has been published in the journal PLoS Biology.
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.
Our paper “Pigment concentrations only partially predict avian eggshell colour mimicry in a polymorphic host–brood parasite system” has been published in the journal Biology Letters.
Mairenn Attwood’s paper ‘How do parasites and predators choose their victim? A trade-off between quality and vulnerability across antagonistic interactions’ is out now in the journal Biological Reviews.