Cameron Blair and Jonah Walker have joined the African Cuckoos team! Cameron previously did his BSc(Hons) project on the development of the guiding call of the greater honeyguide with the African Honeyguides team, and he has just started his MSc at the University of Cape Town, looking at how brood-parasitic honeyguide chicks are able to acoustically deceive their host parents. He is currently in the field assisting Tanmay Dixit with his work on cuckoo finches and their hosts. Jonah has also joined the team, working on the thermal properties of the eggs of cisticolas and prinias in Zambia, which are hosts of the cuckoo finch. This work will incorporate existing data and field studies in the 2022 rainy season. Welcome to both!
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.