So if you’ve read some of my previous blogs or follow me on Twitter (@alex_babbler), then you’ll probably be aware that some of my PhD research was recently shown as part of the BBC 2 documentary series World’s Sneakiest Animals. So I’m sorry if it feels like over kill to write about this again, but hey it’s not every day that your work appears on TV, let alone a BBC doco! Plus it will probably be the last time, so I’ll milk it for all I can!
 
But this post isn’t really just about my work; it’s about the other cool studies shown on camera. The thing that surprised me the most about the most about this series was the amount of the research that I had either seen presented at conferences or had been done by scientists that I personally know or that I had helped out with. This just goes to show how small a world the behavioural ecology field is, but also how many exciting young scientist there are currently picking apart the natural world (as all of the below research is by young academics). So below I will put a brief description of what is shown on the TV show, a comment on how I knew about it and then a link to the research (as it’s always far more exciting than the 5-10 mins of footage you’ll see on screen).
 
Firstly, the mimetic orchid mantis, whose mimicry is good that they actually attract more pollinators to them than the flowers they are mimicking. This work was done by James O’Hanlon, and I first saw it presented at ISBE in Lund 2012. He’s a great speaker, as shown by this YouTube video: LINK. Because the mantis is larger than and appears brighter than (to the insects they are predating on) than the flowers they are mimicking then they are a supernormal stimulus. It’s just a really cool bit of nature and very elegant research.
 
It appears at 4:09 in Episode 2 (The Hunger Game).
 
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/673858?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/673858?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
 
Secondly, drongos stealing food from unsuspecting host species. This bit of storytelling was really a combination of a couple of papers. The first is a paper that I helped with and whose first author is Bruce Baigrie, investigated how drongos use sentinel calls to manipulate sociable weavers in a fascinating mutualism. The second paper and third papers, by Tom Flower, delves into the mimetic alarm calls that drongos use to steal food from their host species. Every time the drongos have appeared on TV it has always been with them shown as stealing food from meerkats, but the species that they hammer the most are the sociable weavers and then possibly the pied babblers. In fact, much of the early work was done looking at the dynamics of how drongos and babblers interacted.
 
It appears at 49:12 in Episode 2 (The Hunger Game).
 
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/281/1791/20141232.short
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/278/1711/1548.short
https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=W6TB-BUAAAAJ&citation_for_view=W6TB-BUAAAAJ:ufrVoPGSRksC
 
Thirdly, the show describes how honeyguides parasitise other species to have them raise their own offspring. This is based on the work of Claire Spottiswoode, an amazing field researcher who splits her time between Cambridge, Cape Town and Zambia. Honeyguides lay their eggs in the underground nests of bee-eaters and when their young hatch they hatch early and then grow a sharp hook at the end of their beak that they use to kill their unrelated brood mates - very deadly. By doing this they can monopolise the provisioning of their host offspring. This section of the show also goes into the natural history of cuckoos, and who is a better expert on the subject than Nick Davies. So for the cuckoos I will recommend a great book that goes through not only Prof Davies’ work but that of his forbears and contemporaries.
 
It appears at 43:47 in Episode 3 (Sex, Lies and Dirty Tricks).
 
http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2011/09/06/rsbl.2011.0739.short
http://beheco.oxfordjournals.org/content/18/4/792.short
Cuckoo: Cheating by Nature – Nick Davies
 
Lastly, as it was actually the final part of the series, my work on fledgling provisioning in pied babblers. My work shows that young fledgling babblers, who are amazingly incompetent fliers who are very slow to respond to alarm calls can get fed up to 9 times as much food by moving to areas of danger when predators have been spotted in the local environment. Adults feed the chicks to shut them up and move them to safety.
 
It appears at 51:46 in Episode 3 (Sex, Lies and Dirty Tricks).
 
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/280/1760/20130558.short
 
Other notable studies in the final episode of the series are on Kangeroos (that I think an ex-Cambridg classmate Emily Best) and bowerbirds (which is similar to the work of an ex-colleague Jess Isden), and fiddler crabs that I have blogged about before. It’s a very small world.

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

Biology letters have just released a list of their most read papers from June of this year, not papers published in June but just those that were read the most in that month. I thought that it might be a good idea to skim these and pick out the ones that I thought sounded the most interesting/weird and just share the paper and a link to it. I was going to post the abstracts but then I got carried away and chose a fair few, and if you are like me then you get bored when reading long blog posts on the internet. I've also just put a little clarifier as to why I think the paper is cool.

So, in no particular order, my top top read papers (from Biology letter, in June 2014). In addition, by chance and not design, it's also a top 10!

1. I like signal theory and any research that shows deception is pretty cool:

Brown et al (2012) It pays to cheat: tactical deception in a cephalopod social signalling system, Biol. Lett. 8:729-732
http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/8/5/729.full

2. Research on cooperation and conflict extends from intracellular to ecosystem levels, this is just a very unexpected area to find cooperation:

Pearcy et al (2014) Team swimming in ant spermatozoa. Biol. Lett. 10:20140308
http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/6/20140308.full

3. Hugging trees makes you cool, enough said:


Briscoe et al (2014) Tree-hugging koalas demonstrate a novel thermoregulatory mechanism for arboreal mammals. Biol. Lett. 10:20140235http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/6/20140235.full

4. Work on mate choice in humans usually focuses on things like facial symmetry, height or smell, this work just seems to be very different (and again it looks at honesty in signalling):


Neave et al (2011) Male dance moves that catch a woman's eye. Biol. Lett. 7:221-224
http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/7/2/221.full

5. Just an amazing title, but also interesting work:

Levy (2013) Monsters are people too. Biol. Lett. 9:20120850
http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/9/1/20120850.full

6. An interesting study on how environmental factors can strongly shape behavioural and physiological traits that are associated with sexual selection and mate choice:

Zuk et al (2006) Silent night: adaptive disappearance of a sexual signal in a parasitized population of field crickets. Biol. Lett. 2:521-524
http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/2/4/521.full

7. The results are not really a surprise, but it shows how easy it is to manipulate our emotions:

Blumstein et al (2010) Do film soundtracks contain nonlinear analogues to influence emotion? Biol. Lett. 751-754
http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/6/6/751.full

8. I always like research that can span disciplines, and this work spans psychology, behavioural biology and conservation. The work helps to justify, not that it's really needed, conservation of green spaces:

Fuller et al (2007) Psychological benefits of greenspace increase with biodiversity. Biol. Lett. 3: 390-394
http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/3/4/390.full

9. An evolutionary explanation for why your hands go wrinkly, who would not love this??

Kareklas et al (2013) Water-induced finger wrinkles improve handling of wet objects. Biol. Lett. 9:20120999
http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/9/2/20120999.full

10. Preferential aggression towards kin, goes against most things I was taught as an undergrad and looks like a fruitful area of future research:

Dunn et al (2014) Higher aggression towards closer relatives by soldier larvae in a polyembryonic wasp. Biol. Lett. 10: 20140229
http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/5/20140229.full

Here is the link to the full list: http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/reports/most-read