Stephanie McClelland’s paper entitled “Embryo movement is more frequent in avian brood parasites than birds with parental reproductive strategies” has been published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Stephanie measured embryonic movement of brood parasites and their hosts at sites all over the world. She found that compared to hosts and other non-parasitic birds, brood-parasitic birds show elevated muscle movement while still in the egg, which might help to strengthen their muscles so they can more effectively kill or outcompete host chicks as soon as they hatch. At our study site in Zambia, Stephanie collaborated with several members of the African Cuckoos team, including Tanmay Dixit, Jess Lund, Silky Hamama, Luke McClean and Claire Spottiswoode. The data from this site focused on honeyguides, cuckoo finches, and Vidua finches, as well as their respective hosts. The study was covered by press articles in The Atlantic and The Daily Mail. Well done Steph and everyone else on the team!
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.