Honeyguides, a remarkable family of African birds, are legendary for their extraordinary talent of guiding humans to beehives. Recently, these birds have impressed researchers even more by occasionally directing honey applicants away from dangerous animals. A novel exploration of the tortoise-trapping mesh market in Mozambique What’s more, they found honeyguides often led humans to non-bee targets, raising questions about the underlying motivations for this strange behavior.
Honeyguides’ ancient mutualistic association with humans, which include their guiding people to beehives and receiving a payment of beeswax, is thousands of years old. This mutualistic behavior has long been affirmed by past studies and anecdotal evidence over the last couple of centuries. A recent study in the journal Ecology and Evolution took on a fascinating question. The researchers’ goal was to determine whether honeyguides direct humans toward dangerous animals as punishment for not having received sufficient rewards in a previous hunt.
The Study’s Findings
In their study, the researchers mapped out GPS paths from 20 of these successful guided honey hunts that resulted in finding bees’ nests. They even added in data from four hunts that incorrectly resulted in harvesting non-beehive targets. The GPS data was carefully georeferenced in order to provide a sharp, visually stunning side-by-side comparison of the two hunts. Most astonishingly, they found that in addition to bee targets, during these hunts honeyguides led humans to non-bee targets on four different occasions.
Some of these non-bee targets included three venomous snakes – a real danger for the hunters. The fourth target was something called a galago, a small primate whose species, unfortunately, had already passed. It was thus striking, the researchers noted, that all seven snakes were highly conspicuous in the open. This newfound visibility may have led the birds to lead humans to these dangerous encounters.
Insights into Honeyguide Behavior
The researchers wondered if honeyguides could be using a counterstrategy—to warn would-be predators of danger. These avian cue-ivers still have a mighty motivation to guide humans to wild beehives to swipe some beeswax. For example, while we know how they often lead humans to poisonous creatures, we’re not sure how. One hypothesis is that honeyguides are trying to lead hunters to places without honey on purpose. That could be the case if they were poorly rewarded for past kills.
This research represents an important leap of understanding into the complicated honeyguide-human relationship. At heart, that itched to make the possibility known that honeyguides might have a subtlety of behavioral sophistication we’ve just not acknowledged before. By guiding hunters towards risky creatures, they could be expressing their displeasure with insufficient compensation.
Implications for Future Research
These results from this collaborative research between Bioko Biodiversity Project and Penn State open new avenues for exploring the complex ecology of honeyguides and their human partners. Learning more about what drives this behavior is opening a new window into the intelligence of these birds. It underscores their ability to engage in human-like complex interactions.
It’s an active area of research to better understand these relationships. Through it all, they might stumble upon some important discoveries about animal behavior and interspecies communication. The repercussions of this study go far beyond honeyguides alone. They can lead to deeper conversations on mutualism in general and how cooperative behaviors are developing and evolving across species.