Biography

I am currently a BSc(Hons) student at the University of Cape Town. My first introduction to honeyguides was through a picture book at age six: Honey…Honey…Lion! by Jan Brett. It tells the tale of a honeyguide who punishes a greedy honey badger after he doesn’t share the bees wax spoils that the pair worked together to obtain. It was to my absolute delight, that 15 years after reading it, Claire unspooled the evidence and hypotheses that underpins this fable in one of my undergraduate classes. This was during my BSc where I majored in Applied Maths and Quantitative Biology at the University of Cape Town (and minored in rock climbing, orchestral/rock music, reading, flower pressing, and copious-amounts-of-tea drinking).

I occasionally grumbled that maths took up 90% of my time during my undergrad, but fortunately I now possess a few quantitative skills, and a love for mathematical models. Even more fortunately, mathematical models provide us with the tools necessary to answer some key questions about the human-honeyguide coevolution (and generate even more!) and are the reason I have been lucky enough to join this project for my Honours year. 

Research focus

Currently, I am working on developing, analysing and describing an agent-based model that simulates the dynamics of honey hunting interactions in Niassa, Mozambique, in collaboration with Dr Anne Kandler and Dr Laurel Fogarty at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. The model follows humans and honeyguides as they interact, seek honey, and learn from their experiences. Using the model, we can analyse the dynamics of emergent patterns driven by individual behaviours and better understand this complex, adaptive system. Next, I aim to apply this model to the incredible diversity of honey-hunting cultures present today and generate cross-cultural predictions across Africa, drawing from the geographic mosaic theory of coevolution.