Last week the Kenyan government burnt a huge stock of Ivory. Here's a link to footage of the multiple tusk bonfires: LINK

This is an impressive act but the question still remains as the the best course of action that governments should take with their siezed Ivory. Ivory is a commodity like anything else: sugar, coffee or chocolate. Supply and demand economics impact on its price. Will destroying a large amount of Ivory drive up price? This could have the knock on effect of increasing poaching as the rewards are greater. Alternatively, such a publicised display may drive down demand and so reduce poaching levels. The poaching networks are complex, crossing continents and with multiple levels and middlemen. Thus, it may be impossible to know the direct impact of Kenya's decision.

There are alternative paths that other Aftican governments have chosen. Under the supervision of CITES, four southern African countries (Botswana, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe) carried out auctions to accredited buyers and raised $15.4 million for conservation. Most of this Ivory was legal Ivory, collected from elephants that had died naturally in national parks. I know private game reserves do the same, and a reserve close to my PhD field site flew about $4 million worth of rhino horn to a safe location. But is this type of sale right? Doesn't it just maintain a market for poached Ivory? Or does it allow governments to generate revenue to protect enigmatic species (and probably loads of others in the process)? (https://cites.org/eng/news/pr/2008/081107_ivory.shtml)

This is the forefront of modern conservation. It's where conservation science, economics (macro and behavioural) and human geography collide. This is one reason for the building of the new Cambridge Conservation Campus, recently opened by Sir David Attenborough. These questions are not easy to solve but they are solvable! http://www.conservation.cam.ac.uk/cambridge-conservation-campus

I had the amazing opportunity to go back to the Fitz last week to give a talk and get an award. Somehow I'd managed to get an award for the best PhD thesis submitted to the Science Faculty. The best part was that I got to go back to UCT, give a talk about the babblers and catch up with some friends I've not seen for a while.

So this is a random blog to inform people of the cool work that is being done by people at the Fitz (which is a great place to go and study birds).

Firstly, there were three people (my old office mates) who were away. Susie Cunningham, who is an amazing expert on the bill tip organ of kiwi and how they use it to find food (as well as the bill tip organ of a number of other birds), was away in the UK. Susie is working on the effects of heat on birds, with a view to understanding how climate change will impact bird populations [one of Susie's papers]. Secondly, Susie's PhD student and fellow Kalahari veteran Tanja van de Ven. Tanja is studying the same hornbill population that I helped Mike Finnie set up and looking at temperature effects on these amazing birds, using some cool thermal imaging video! Thirdly, Marie-Sophie Garcia-Heras (a mouthful of a name!) who is doing a PhD investigating factors that influence the movement of black harriers.

But I did get to see some people, and spend some time in the pub (where all serious science is done). Arjun Amar, who is now collaborating with Susie on the red-winged starlings that inhabit the campus, has been really successful with his work on sparrowhawks. Arjun has recently been involved in some slightly controversial but really important work on grouse and bearded vultures. Margaux Rat has just started a post doc with Susie on the Hot Birds Project after finishing her PhD on social weavers. Margaux's PhD was looking at the social interactions of this species that lives in such large complex colonies, she's got some papers in the works so watch this space! I also got to catch up with Chevonne Reynolds, who's just wrapping up her thesis investigating the much maligned Egyptian goose (which I always get told is actually a shell duck!) and she's recently had a paper published in Diversity and Distributions.

So all amazing scientists doing great work. If your interested in any of the stuff they are doing then look them up and I'm sure they'd be happy to speak to you!

The Fitz is a great place to do research and the people are one of the things that makes it.

Just three cool papers that are worth a quick read:

Cunningham et al. (2015) Can behaviour buffer the impacts of climate change on an arid-zone bird? Ostrich 86: 119-126
Behavioural thermoregulation, particularly the use of cool microclimates, is one method by which organisms could avoid the worst effects of climate warming. However, retreat into cool microsites, e.g. shady vegetation or burrows, may carry important lost-opportunity costs. These could include reduced opportunity for foraging, breeding or territorial defence, each carrying implications for fitness. We investigated patterns of microclimate use and foraging behaviour by Southern Fiscals Lanius collaris in the Kalahari. We used Ivlev's electivity index to assess preference of breeding males for perch types with different thermal properties. We found that Southern Fiscals preferred to hunt from high, sunny perches at all times, except on hot afternoons (air temperature >35 °C), when they switched their preference to high, shaded perches. Black-bulb thermometers indicated shaded perches were always cooler than sunny perches, especially on hot afternoons. Therefore, Southern Fiscals could reduce thermoregulatory costs by switching foraging locations. However, Southern Fiscal foraging success rates were highest when hunting from sunny perches, and were reduced by c. 50% when hunting from shaded perches. Our data suggest that Southern Fiscals were making a trade-off on hot afternoons, compromising foraging intake in return for thermal benefits. We discuss potential costs and consequences of this trade-off under climate change. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.2989/00306525.2015.1016469


Westrip & Bell (2015) Breaking down the species boundaries: selective pressures behind interspecific communication in vertebrates. Ethology DOI: 10.1111/eth.12379
Studying heterospecific communication provides an opportunity to examine the dynamics of cross-species social behaviour. It allows us to ask questions about the extent to which the transfer of information is adaptive or accidental and provides an empirically tractable context for manipulating relationships. To date, most studies of heterospecific communication have focussed on receivers. However, the selective pressures on signallers can be as important in determining the dynamics of interspecific communication. Here, we propose a simple framework for thinking about cross-species information transfer, which (i) considers whether information exchange is either accidental or adaptive and (ii) whether it is unidirectional or bidirectional. To clearly classify interactions, it is necessary to quantify all of the payoffs of interspecific communication to both signallers and receivers. This requires accurate characterisation of the currency influenced by cross-species communication (e.g. weight gain, foraging success, survival). However, quantifying the payoffs may be difficult, because each side may be benefiting via different currencies. To date, studies on heterospecific communication have focussed on only one dimension of a niche (usually antipredator or foraging signals). However, because niches are multidimensional, investigations should incorporate multiple aspects of a species’ niche, to get a better perspective on why we see certain patterns of information use between species.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eth.12379/abstract;jsessionid=27595B1F63B33763D53AC2405EBA6067.f03t03?deniedAccessCustomisedMessage=&userIsAuthenticated=false

Flower et al. (2015) Dual parasitism of fork-tailed drongos by African and Jacobin cuckoos. Ostrich 86: 1-2
Different species of brood parasitic birds, which lay their eggs in the nests of host foster-parents, rarely target the same host species population. We report brood parasitism of Fork-tailed Drongos Dicrurus adsimilis in the southern Kalahari Desert by both African Cuckoo Cuculus gularis and Jacobin Cuckoo Clamator jacobinus serratus. Drongos are the only known host for the African Cuckoo, and were more frequently parasitised by this species (21.8% nests). Nevertheless, parasitism rates suggest that in the Kalahari, drongos are also an important host for Jacobin Cuckoo (4.6% nests). Jacobin Cuckoos likely compete with African Cuckoos for drongo hosts, as exemplified by the occurrence of both African and Jacobin Cuckoo eggs in the same drongo clutch. The drongo's defensive adaptations to parasitism by African Cuckoos, including egg rejection, may also curtail parasitism by Jacobin Cuckoos. The extent of competition between these cuckoo species and whether they possess adaptations to prevent one another's access to drongo hosts remains to be explored.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.2989/00306525.2015.1029032

As part of my job I have to read a newspaper every day. I check to see if there are any dodgy science stories, if there are any major misrepresentations of research and collect articles related to ongoing projects. Currently I'm on the Times, not as bad as the Telegraph and with less hype than the Daily Mail. In the last couple of weeks I've seen some stories about British wildlife that have made me sad and slightly despondent with the current state of our wildlife and how we treat it.

The first was reporting on the huge decline in the number of British hedgehogs. These lovable creatures, favourites among children's cartoons and Green Cross Code adverts, are an integral part of our culture. But they have suffered a huge decline from their number of around 30 million in the 1950's to less than a million today. They are declining at a rapid rate and Micheala Strachen has warned that they could be extinct within 10 years. However, the treasure of British children's wildlife TV is over blowing the reality of the situation. But just because they wont be extinct within a decade doesn't mean nothing should be done. The habitat of these nocturnal foragers has become highly fragmented, making it difficult for them to search for food. Decreasing pockets of habitat are never good for a species, as smaller areas can support fewer individuals and if dispersal is difficult it can lead to reduced genetic diversity. Smaller populations are also more vulnerable to stochastic events that can lead to local extinctions. All-in-all, not great.

But hopefully a bit of publicity will do the hedgehog some good. People don't tend to like it when cute, charismatic species are doing badly. With this one on our door step, it should be easy to encourage people to make the minor alterations to their gardens, such as cutting small holes in fences, that can de-fragment their habitat. But hedgehogs might be the victim of the perceived dullness of British nature, and people caring more about animals in distant corners of the globe than declining species like starlings and cuckoos that live within our shores. I'm a victim of this, I went of to South Africa to study exotic species rather than any one of the plethora of our native fauna. In South Africa everyone wants to study their native species and are intensely interested in their conservation, they take pride in their local biodiversity. This is starting here in the UK, with the growth of programmes like Spring and Autumn Watch, but we need to do more to educate and engage.

The second story was about badgers...oh the poor badgers. I wont write too much as I have written stuff about badgers before (and sadly not much has changed!). The Times ran two stories, one about DEFRA ignoring the British Veterinary Associations calls to stop the cull because it's not been shown to be an effective or humane way of killing bagders (LINK £). The second was an opinion piece by the Deputy President of the National Farmers Union, Minette Batters (LINK £). Ms Batters' piece argues that culling badgers is the same as culling any other species of animal, but this misses the point. Deer are culled because they damage vegetation and prevent the growth of trees, by culling deer there are less of them and so less damage is caused. The number of deer killed is probably (I'm not an expert on deer ecology, so this is with pinch of salt) highly correlated to the amount of damage caused to vegetation. Badger are a completely different kettle of fish. They are culled to reduce the spread of bovine TB, and a very extensive, long-term and well carried out study looked into the effect of culling badgers on the spread of TB. If you cull but not to a high enough level then you actually make the spread of bTB worse. All of the evidence that has been gathered points to this course of action being one that will not achieve its aim. So the argument put forward doesn't work: one type of culling we know works and the other we know doesn't.

The argument made by people like the NFU's deputy president assumes that the opposition to the badger cull is an emotive, bunny hugging, tree-hugging hippie one. It's not. It's one based on the science and evidence. All the major scientists have said that it won't work and have huge problems with the way the cull is being evaluated (no longer independent and with marksmen collecting their own data). I just hope that someone, somewhere in DEFRA decides to look at the evidence, because this course of action could make the problem of TB in cattle worse.

So after finishing my PhD I went back the kalahari to help Tom Flower out with some cool work investigating deception tactics and learning in fork-tailed drongos. While I was there I also had a chance to help his honours student, Bruce, out with his research investigating the relationship between drongos and sociable weavers. The kalahari is full of cool inter-species interactions (I'll put a couple of papers below). Bruce's work has just been published in Proceedings of the Royal Society, I have put the abstract and a link to the paper below. The work was really fun to do and highlights how conflict and cooperation have to coexist in both and ecological and evolutionary setting, and that this can lead to cool things evolving.

Baigrie, Thompson & Flower (2014) Interspecific signalling between mutualists: food-thieving drongos use a cooperative sentinel call to manipulate foraging partners. Proc R Soc, 281:20141232
Interspecific communication is common in nature, particularly between mutualists. However, whether signals evolved for communication with other species, or are in fact conspecific signals eavesdropped upon by partners, is often unclear. Fork-tailed drongos (Dicrurus adsimilis) associate with mixed-species groups and often produce true alarms at predators, whereupon associating species flee to cover, but also false alarms to steal associating species' food (kleptoparasitism). Despite such deception, associating species respond to drongo non-alarm calls by increasing their foraging and decreasing vigilance. Yet, whether these calls represent interspecific sentinel signals remains unknown. We show that drongos produced a specific sentinel call when foraging with a common associate, the sociable weaver (Philetairus socius), but not when alone. Weavers increased their foraging and decreased vigilance when naturally associating with drongos, and in response to sentinel call playback. Further, drongos sentinel-called more often when weavers were moving, and weavers approached sentinel calls, suggesting a recruitment function. Finally, drongos sentinel-called when weavers fled following false alarms, thereby reducing disruption to weaver foraging time. Results therefore provide evidence of an ‘all clear’ signal that mitigates the cost of inaccurate communication. Our results suggest that drongos enhance exploitation of a foraging mutualist through coevolution of interspecific sentinel signals.
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/281/1791/20141232.abstract

Other cool interspecies interactions:

Pied babblers and scimitarbills:
Ridley, Wiley & Thompson (2014) The ecological benefits of interceptive eavesdropping. Functional Ecology, 28: 197-205

Drongos and pied babblers:Flower (2011) Fork-tailed drongos use deceptive mimicked alarm calls to steal food. Proc R Soc, 278:1548-1555

A cool paper by Bell et al has just come out in Nature Communications (abstract and link below). The study uses a hormonal manipulation to investigate the evolution or reproductive suppression in cooperatively breeding meerkats. Similar work has been done on banded mongooses. The national press picked up this recent paper because it was on meerkats, who in the UK are Russian and compare car insurance prices (this statement isn't meant to detract from the quality of the research). However, the response of the public to this work has been a bit odd, read the comments on the bottom of the dailymail coverage. I think these comments highlight the publics lack of understanding of how science works. A large amount of the comments seems to say that this has been known for ages because it was on Meerkat Manor, and so thought the work pointless. But this work is new and novel, providing an experimental approach to testing the hypothesis of adaptive reproductive suppression. What the tv series reported was based on correlational data and theories, but this work has proved it experimentally. I just hope that these comments say more about dailymail readers than it does about the average persons understanding of science and how it relates to semi-fictional soap-opera-style documentaries.

Bell, Cant, Borgeaud, Thavarajah, Samson & Clutton-Brock (2014) Suppressing subordinate reproduction provides benefits to dominants in cooperative societies of meerkats. Nature Communications.
In many animal societies, a small proportion of dominant females monopolize reproduction by actively suppressing subordinates. Theory assumes that this is because subordinate reproduction depresses the fitness of dominants, yet the effect of subordinate reproduction on dominant behaviour and reproductive success has never been directly assessed. Here, we describe the consequences of experimentally preventing subordinate breeding in 12 groups of wild meerkats (Suricata suricatta) for three breeding attempts, using contraceptive injections. When subordinates are prevented from breeding, dominants are less aggressive towards subordinates and evict them less often, leading to a higher ratio of helpers to dependent pups, and increased provisioning of the dominant’s pups by subordinate females. When subordinate breeding is suppressed, dominants also show improved foraging efficiency, gain more weight during pregnancy and produce heavier pups, which grow faster. These results confirm the benefits of suppression to dominants, and help explain the evolution of singular breeding in vertebrate societies.
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/140722/ncomms5499/full/ncomms5499.html

and a link to that banded mongoose paper:
http://www.bandedmongoose.org/wp-content/uploads/Cant-et-al-2014-PNAS.pdf

I recently attended the annual Meerkat-Mongoose Meeting, organised by LARG, at the University of Cambridge. This small scale conference has been going for a number of years and allows researchers working on meerkats, banded mongoose, and other species at the Kuruman River Reserve and other random study species, to come together and talk about proposed future work and unpublished research. The atmosphere is great, very like a student conference, and allows a fairly informal environment for critical feedback. 
At this meeting a very different topic came up: a new educational book inspired by the work of the Banded Mongoose Project to inspire and educate children in Uganda and the UK. The project has brought out a book called 'Billy the Banded Mongoose', which you can buy or use (if you're a teacher) as an educational tool and the proceeds go to helping education in Uganda. Here is the link:
http://billythebandedmongoose.co.uk/

And here are some other links related to the Meerkat-Mongoose Meeting:
Kalahari Meerkat Project
Babbler Research
IEU at Zurich University

I know this ‘coverage’ is a bit late but I was on a remote Scottish Island when this paper came out and as Tom is the first of my friends to get a paper in Science I obviously had to write about it. And as you will now know, I know the authors and so my slant on this paper will probably be biased in a positive way.

So the paper is:

Flower et al (2014) Deception by flexible alarm mimicry in an African Bird. 344: 513-516

Firstly you’ll need a bit of background on fork-tailed drongos (Dicrurus adsimilis), hereafter drongos. They are extremely agile birds that live in Southern Africa and are very adept at hawking small flying insects. In addition to their aerobatics they are vocal mimics that can copy the calls of other species, and they use these calls to make false alarm calls (i.e. when there are no real predators) to scare individuals from other species (host species) when they have food, then they fly down and steal the food item. Drongos primarily spend time with sociable weavers (Philetairus socius), pied babblers (Turdoides bicolor) and meerkats (Suricata suricatta). Previous work has investigated some of these associations, and I have put the papers at the end.

The problem with using these false alarm calls to gain food from other species, usually food that drongos are unable to gain themselves, is that if you are deceptive too often then your hosts will stop responding. However, these host species don’t just have their food stolen by drongos, they actually use drongos as part of their vigilance system as drongos will alarm at actual predators. Thus there is an interesting ‘mutualism’ that exists within this system. This investigation sought to understand how drongos maximize their gain from these repeated interactions.

Natural observations of this wild population showed that drongos exclusively use mimetic alarm calls in 42% of false alarms and a combination of mimetic and drongo specific calls in a further 27%. To investigate these patterns the researchers carried out a playback experiment using four drongo generated call types:  1) a control territorial call 2) drongo-specific alarm 3) mimic of glossy starling (Lamprotornis nitens) alarm and 4) mimic of pied babbler alarm. The experiment was carried out on groups of habituated pied babblers, a host species for the drongos. Pied babblers were slower to return to foraging after mimetic alarms than drongo specific ones, thus showing that mimetic alarm calls produce a stronger response. They then carried out a second experiment where they played back three calls in one of four treatments: 1) All drongo-specific alarms 2) All mimetic starling alarms 3) two drongo followed by a starling and 4) two starling followed by a drongo alarm. They found that pied babblers habituated to treatments of all one type but not to the treatments that varied. Showing that varying the calls you use has benefits for the drongo. These experimental results fit with the natural data that showed in instances of repeated attempts at theft on the same individual that drongos changed the false alarm call that they used on 74% of occasions. Drongos were more likely to change if their previous attempt had failed.

This paper shows that drongos avoid host species habituating to false alarm calls by varying the mimetic false alarms that they use and thus avoiding frequency dependent constraints.

This paper has a great blend of natural observation and carefully designed experiments. The results speak for themselves and tell an interesting story of how birds in the wild adjust to problems that are familiar to many people. It shows the value of working at a research site with multiple habituated species that associate and interact in interesting ways, and thus the value of long-term research stations.

Some of the media coverage seems to have sensationalized this work, going much further with their assertions than the authors did. Some have even suggested that these birds have ‘theory of mind’. Sciencemag noted that Tom (Dr Flower) is doing some current work to further investigate drongos tactics and learning, work that I assisted with in the Kalahari. From my observations while performing these experiments the drongos seemed to use simple rules and were not as clever as we had hoped. However, that does not detract from the brilliance of their behaviour: many complex behaviours and structures are made using simple rules, e.g. spider’s webs and wasp nests. Even some seemingly complex human behaviours are governed by simple rules. The amazing adaptability of evolution is shown by such seemingly complex behaviours. In fact the authors use examples such as the changing of cell surface proteins by influenza as an analogue to drongo behaviour, and I’m pretty sure that virus’s don’t have theory of mind!

Here are some links to other media coverage:

http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/2014/05/african-bird-cries-wolf-steal-food?rss=1

http://whyfiles.org/2014/deceptive-bird-lies-to-steal-food/

http://www.nbcnews.com/science/weird-science/african-bird-uses-sound-effects-bamboozle-other-species-n94256

More drongo papers:

Flower et al (2013) The ecological economics of kleptoparasitism: pay-offs from self-foraging versus kleptoparasitism. Journal of Animal Ecology 82:245-255

Flower & Gribble (2012) Kleptoparasitism by attacks versus alarm calls in fork-tailed drongos. Animal Behaviour 83:403-410

Ridley & Child (2009) Specific targeting of host individuals by a kleptoparasitic bird. Behavioral Ecology & Sociobiology 63: 1119-1126.