How fork-tailed drongo egg signatures defend against near-perfect African cuckoo mimicry
Please note that this webinar is not available via our YouTube channel.
Parental care is costly, but avian brood parasites get around this by laying their eggs in the nests of a different bird species – their ‘host’. The host then bears the burden of raising the parasitic chick, often to the detriment of its own offspring. But hosts can fight back by rejecting (i.e. removing from their nests) cuckoo eggs that look dissimilar to their own eggs. This behaviour leads to cuckoos evolving eggs that mimic host eggs in colour and pattern. But what happens when a cuckoo’s egg evolves to be a perfect match for the host eggs?
The African Cuckoo is a brood parasite that mimics the eggs of its host, the Fork-tailed Drongo, with remarkable accuracy. In her talk, Jess will explore the concept of perfect mimicry, focussing on the evidence for perfect mimicry in the African Cuckoo and Fork-tailed Drongo system, how drongos can fight back against a perfect mimic, and what this means for the future of the system. She will also compare the African Cuckoo and Fork-tailed Drongo system to other brood parasites and their hosts, and discuss the role that genetics play in restricting or facilitating perfect mimicry.
Additional Details
Webinar link - https://us06web.zoom.us/j/85109030750?pwd=ImiOeW85iCbCZWDU1Gm1M9wvDbbrqb.1
Meeting ID - 851 0903 0750
Passcode - 421934
Event platform - zoom
Interaction
Please type your questions in the meeting chat. Jess will answer them at the end of the presentation.
Organizer
Jess is an evolutionary biologist and has been studying brood parasites – namely African Cuckoos, Greater Honeyguides, and Cuckoo Finches – for five years. She grew up on a farm in Limpopo, where her passion for birds began, and went on to do her BSc and Masters at the University of Cape Town. She is now doing her PhD at the University of Cambridge, and is investigating how the early lives of brood parasites in the nests of their hosts can influence their lives as adults. More broadly, she is interested in the effect of species interactions on evolution, as well as how these interactions can generate evolutionary novelty. Despite currently being based in the UK, she spends as much time as possible in the field in Mozambique and Zambia, and remains unashamedly biased towards African birdlife.