Dr Claire Spottiswoode

Tel: +44 (0) 1223 768 946
Fax: +44 (0) 1223 336 676
Email: cns26 at cam.ac.uk

Position held: Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Research Fellow
Raymond & Beverly Sackler Senior Research Fellow, Magdalene College

Research
 

I'm an evolutionary ecologist working particularly on Afrotropical birds. My research currently focuses particularly on coevolution between brood parasitic birds and their hosts, but I am also interested in and have worked on life history evolution, sexual selection, bird migration, and conservation.

My work is funded by a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Research Fellowship, the DST/NRF Centre of Excellence at the Percy FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology at the University of Cape Town, South Africa (where I am a Research Associate) and a L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Fellowship. From 2013 to 2018, I'll be supported by a BBSRC David Phillips Fellowship.

Prospective students interested in host-parasite coevolution or any of the other fields below are very welcome to contact me. Please also visit our group Opportunities page for more information on funding possibilities for graduate students and post-docs.

 
 
 

HOST-PARASITE COEVOLUTION

At a study site in the Choma District of southern Zambia, I study coevolutionary interactions between three independently evolved brood parasitic species, the Cuckoo Finch Anomalospiza imberbis, Greater Honeyguide Indicator indicator and African Cuckoo Cuculus gularis, and their respective hosts. These are ongoing field projects involving a range of coevolutionary questions, but focussing particularly on coevolutionary arms races in egg appearance between hosts and parasites that mimic their eggs, and the evolution of host-specificity within parasitic species that exploit multiple hosts species

Cuckoo Finches:
Cuckoo Finches parasitise a range of warbler (Prinia and Cisticola) species, some of which have extraordinarily variable eggs between females of the same species, which have in turn been mimicked by their parasite (right). The extreme variation in appearance of host eggs (egg 'signatures') seems to make them more difficult to forge by parasites: complex egg appearance seems to foil mimicry just as the complex watermarks on banknotes deter forgers. Together with Martin Stevens, I am investigating how coevolution between host and parasite has been shaped by visual perception. By means of field experiments and visual modelling to quantify egg appearance through a birds' eye, we have found that hosts use several different aspects of egg colour and pattern as cues of parasitism, and that these are precisely those egg traits that reveal the most reliable information about whether an egg is likely to be parasitic (see 27). We have also found that coevolution can take divergent trajectories in different hosts: two different defence strategies (egg signatures and improved visual discrimination) are equally effective as host defences (see 31). Some of these research questions were recently discussed in an interview published in The Observer.

Photos at right: (top) Eggs of the Tawny-flanked Prinia (left column) and its parasite the Cuckoo Finch (right column), showing egg 'signatures' in hosts, and corresponding forgeries in parasites. (bottom) What happens if a host fails to spot a parasitic egg: a Cuckoo Finch chick monopolises a host nest, here a Red-faced Cisticola's.
(More photos on a BBC online gallery here)

  




All photos on this page copyright Claire Spottiswoode - please email me if you would like to use them.
 
Greater Honeyguides:
Greater Honeyguides are renowned for their unique mutualistic relationship with humans, in which they guide people to bees' nests to help them to gain access to beeswax (which they eat) with the help of humans' use of fire and tools. However, honeyguides also have a much darker side as highly virulent brood parasites that stab their foster siblings to death with specially adapted bill hooks (see 32 and videos here). The late Major John Colebrook-Robjent discovered much about honeyguide breeding biology and I continue research on them on his farm in Zambia. In particular, we have been examining egg size and shape specialisation in females parasitising different host species, the selective pressures upon it, and – together with Michael Sorenson and Katie Stryjewski (Boston University, USA) – the evolutionary history of such host-specific adaptations. We have found that highly distinct genetic lineages of greater honeyguide females have remained perfectly specific to one of two groups of host species for at least 3 million years, specialising either on hosts that breed in tree-hole nests (e.g. hoopoes and woodhoopoes) or in terrestrial burrows (mostly bee-eaters). However, these ancient lineages are not speciating, because a complete lack of host-related differentiation in nuclear genes shows that host-specialist females mates irrespective of which host a male was raised by (see 33). John Colebrook-Robjent and I have also studied some of the coevolutionary consequences of egg puncturing by laying parasites (see 15). I recent talked about some of these questions (mostly chick killing) in a Royal Society Publishing Podcast.

Adult female Greater Honeyguide caught in the act of laying in a Little Bee-eater's nest.
  

Greater Honeyguide chick aged about 8 days, showing bill hooks used to kill host hatchlings: see videos here.
 
 
AVIAN SOCIALITY

Sociable Weavers live in giant communal nests that suffer greatly from snake predation.		  


My PhD research (2002-2005), supervised by Nick Davies, partly involved a detailed field study of a colonial, communal and cooperatively-breeding bird, the Sociable Weaver Philetairus socius. This is a remarkable bird of the Kalahari and Namib deserts of south-western Africa, where it builds enormous haystack-like communal nests in Acacia trees (see below)

Predation by snakes attracted by the size of weaver colonies appears to be a major cost of extreme sociality in this species. I showed that individuals in colonies of different sizes differ with respect to morphology and reproductive investment (see 16), and carried out various field experiments to attempt to distinguish whether these among-colony differences could be explained by adaptive life-history divergence in colonies of different sizes and hence predation risk (see 22).

Further to predation, parasitism and disease are also potential costs of sociality. If so, then we would expect cooperatively breeding birds that live in groups to invest more in immune defence than pair breeding species. I carried out a comparative study of South African and Malawian birds and found that this was so, at least with respect to one measure of immunity (see 18)
 
SEXUAL SELECTION AND BIRD MIGRATION

Migratory birds arrive as early as possible on their breeding grounds not only because of its naturally selected advantages, but also because females prefer early-arriving males as mates. Anders Pape Møller and I showed that this could generate the latitudinal trend that is observed in rates of extra-pair paternity in birds, which are higher in the north-temperate zone where many species are migratory (see 7). But spring conditions are not remaining constant, and as the world's climate warms many migratory birds are arriving earlier and earlier on their breeding grounds. However, the degree of such change varies greatly among species - why is this so? Anders Tøttrup, Tim Coppack and I showed that these differences in species's responses to climate change might be explained by female choice, since in strongly sexually selected species there is the most incentive to arrive earlier as conditions become milder (see 12; also 10). Nicola Saino and I have written a review chapter on the potential relationships between sexual selection and climate change, in an OUP book published in 2010, Effects of Climate Change on Birds (edited by Møller, Fiedler & Berthold).
 
 
 

AFRICAN ORNITHOLOGY AND CONSERVATION

I am South African and my interest in ecology and evolution comes from a life-long passion for African birds and biodiversity. In the last few years I've been involved in conservation-related research in, particularly, the arid rangelands of southern Ethiopia (see 25, 23, 21) in collaboration with the Ethiopian Wildlife and Natural History Society and BirdLife International, and the montane forests of northern Mozambique (see 19, 4, 2), each of which is home to many intruiguing and endangered endemic species. I've also co-written three birdwatching site guidebooks to southern Africa and Ethiopia (below).

(at left: the Ethiopian Bush-crow Zavattariornis stresemanni, one of the six threatened species endemic to southern Ethiopia.)
 
Selected Publications (click here for a complete list & PDF downloads)
 
  • Spottiswoode, C. N. & Stevens, M. (2012) Host-parasite arms races and rapid changes in bird egg appearance. American Naturalist 179: 633-648.
  • Spottiswoode, C.N. & Koorevaar, J. (2012) A stab in the dark: chick killing by brood parasitic honeyguides. Biology Letters 8: 241-244.
  • Spottiswoode, C.N., Stryjewski, K.F., Quader, S., Colebrook-Robjent, J.F.R. & Sorenson, M.D. (2011) Ancient host-specificity within a single species of brood parasitic bird. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 108, 17738-17742.
  • Spottiswoode, C.N. & Stevens, M. (2011) How to evade a coevolving brood parasite: egg discrimination versus egg variability as host defences. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B 278: 3566-3573.
  • Spottiswoode, C.N. & Stevens, M. (2010) Visual modeling shows that avian host parents use multiple
    visual cues in rejecting parasitic eggs. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 107: 8672-8676.
  • Spottiswoode, C.N., Wondafrash, M, Gabremichael, M.N., Dellelegn, Y., Mwangi, M.K., Collar, N.J., Dolman, P.M. (2009) Rangeland degradation is poised to cause Africa’s first recorded avian extinction. Animal Conservation 12: 249-257.
  • Spottiswoode, C.N. (2009) Fine-scale life-history variation in Sociable Weavers in relation to colony size. Journal of Animal Ecology 78: 504-512.
  • Spottiswoode, C.N., Tøttrup, A.P. & Coppack, T. (2006) Sexual selection predicts advancement of avian spring migration in response to climate change. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Series B 273: 3023-3029.
African birding books:
  • Spottiswoode, C., Gabremichael, M.N. & Francis, J. (2010) Where to Watch Birds in Ethiopia. A & C Black, London.
  • Cohen, C., Spottiswoode, C. & Rossouw, J. (2006) Southern African Birdfinder: Where to find 1400 bird species in southern Africa and Madagascar. Struik Publishers, Cape Town.
  • Cohen, C. & Spottiswoode, C. (2000) Essential Birding in Western South Africa. Struik Publishers, Cape Town.

 
 
Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3EJ, U. K.