Dom Cram and Jessica van der Wal shared their latest honeyguide research in two presentations at the Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour (ASAB) Virtual Winter Meeting.  Dom’s talk was entitled “Produce or scrounge? Correlates and consequences of cooperating with humans for the greater honeyguide” and Jessica’s talk was entitled “A micro-geographic mosaic of mutualism between honeyguides and humans”. Read on for more information, and for a link to Dom’s Twitter thread where he gives a step-by-step guide on how he made his unusual presentation, liberated from the shackles of Powerpoint!

Dom Cram’s talk shared his latest findings investigating why some greater honeyguides guide humans to bees, while others stay quiet and then steal a piece of the resulting beeswax. The balance between these ‘producers’ and ‘scroungers’ is important because it determines how many honeyguides are willing or able to guide humans, and therefore how much honey the honey-hunters are able to harvest. Dom  discussed the characteristics of honeyguides that guide and those that scrounge, and the rewards of each strategy in terms of access to beeswax.

Jessica van der Wal’s talk shared her findings on the micro-geographical variation in the calls honey-hunters use to attract honeyguides and maintain their attention while following them to a bees’ nest, and what processes might have led to this spatial divergence. Having surveyed the signals of 129 Yao and Macua honey-hunters in 13 remote villages across the Niassa Special Reserve in Mozambique, she hypothesised that these signals vary arbitrarily (analogously to linguistic divergence), and that despite this, the human-animal communication is still successful. Mapping the micro-geographical mosaic in cultural acoustic traits that are relevant to the mutualism improves our understanding of the stimuli that honeyguides experience, and so how their adaptive strategies might be expected to vary.