Jess’s MSc entitled “Coevolutionary causes and consequences of high-fidelity mimicry by a specialist brood parasite” was awarded with distinction. A massive thank you to the field team which made this work possible, the research group for all their discussion and assistance, and the two examiners who both had some wonderful insights. Jess is still on the team and is now doing her PhD at Cambridge on host-specificity in honeyguides.
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.