Dr Gabriel Jamie, Professor Rebecca Kilner and Dr Claire Spottiswoode from the Department along with colleagues from Zambia, Princeton University, University of Puerto Rico and University of Exeter recently published a paper on mimicry in Africa’s brood-parasitic finches in the journal Evolution.

They studied the indigobirds & whydahs (genus Vidua). This is a radiation of around 19 species of finch which, like many cuckoos, forego their own parental duties and lay their eggs in the nests of other bird species (termed "brood-parasites”). The hosts of Vidua finches are all in the grassfinch family. Grassfinches are unusual among birds in having highly ornamented and diverse nestlings. Each species of Vidua largely specialises in parasitising a single species of grassfinch. Building on the amazing work of Robert Payne and Jürgen Nicolai, we provide quantitative evidence that nestling Vidua finches mimic the patterns, colours and begging calls of their host's nestling, and qualitative evidence of mimicry of host movements. This host-specific mimicry is not only amazing in its own right but may also provide additional reproductive barriers between Vidua finches adapted to different hosts species as well as representing an excellent example of plasticity facilitating genetic adaptation.

The full, open access paper: Jamie, G.A., Van Belleghem, S.M., Hogan, B.G., Hamama, S., Moya, C., Troscianko, J., Stoddard, M.C., Kilner, R.M. and Spottiswoode, C.N. (2020), Multimodal mimicry of hosts in a radiation of parasitic finches. Evolution. doi:10.1111/evo.14057 is available here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/evo.14057