Honeyguide Birds Learn Culturally Distinct Calls Made by Honey Hunters

One of the very few examples of human-animal mutualism, one which may well predate Homo sapiens. In addition to the evolutionary aspect, there’s an additional cultural aspect, where people in a particular area have established a specific call that attracts a honeyguide to come find them a beehive. This is just incredibly cool <3

Throughout nature, different species will occasionally team up in unlikely alliances to work together for each’s mutual benefit. For example, woolly bats in the rainforests of Borneo are known to roost inside tropical pitcher plants. While the hollow-bodied plants provide a safe home for the tiny bats, the plant benefits by catching the guano that the animals produce. The mutual relationship helps ensure each species’ survival.

However, human honey hunters and honeyguide birds have cultivated a unique relationship for thousands of years — and perhaps as early as our hominin ancestors.

Honeyguides are one of a relatively few species of bird that feed regularly on beeswax locked inside the nests of wild bees. Similarly, humans eagerly seek the nests for the honey they contain. However, locating and accessing these nests, which often rest high in the branches of trees, presents a challenge to humans and birds.

With their eyes in the sky, honeyguides naturally know the locations of bee colonies, and humans have the skills to climb or fell trees with nests, subdue the angry bees and open their nests, exposing beeswax for the honeyguides and honey for themselves. Thus, a mutualistic relationship has emerged between honeyguides and humans, where birds exchange their knowledge of bees’ nest locations for humans’ adept skills at accessing the resources inside.

“By birds and people partnering together, everyone gains something of value,” said study author Brian Wood, an anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “This is an example of a very rare phenomenon in nature — cooperation between people and a wild animal.”

Would-be honey hunters attract the birds using specialized and culturally unique calls to signal they are looking for a honeyguide partner and to maintain cooperation while following a guiding bird to a nest.

Honeyguide Birds Learn Culturally Distinct Calls Made by Honey Hunters | American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

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