Mutualisms are enormously impactful in ecological and evolutionary terms, and are often appealing to people because of their positive, uplifting nature. It has long been speculated that honeyguide birds cooperate mutualistically with honey badgers to guide them to bees’ nests. Honeyguides eat wax and are known to guide people in parts of Africa to find bees’ nests for harvest, providing these honey-hunters with unique insights into honeyguide interactions with other species. Writing in the Journal of Zoology, van der Wal and colleagues report cultural knowledge from surveys of honey-hunters who span nine African countries. Honey-hunters were asked about their experiences seeing and believing in cooperative interactions between honeyguides and honey badgers. Combining this first-hand cultural knowledge with details from the literature, the researchers established that it is likely that honeyguides and honey badgers can have cooperative interactions. However, they note that such a relationship is probably highly localized to parts of Tanzania and extremely difficult to observe owing to the confounding effects of human presence on honeyguide behaviour. Without this expert cultural knowledge, the researchers would have drawn the opposite conclusion, with limited evidence of cooperation between the species. This study exemplifies the importance of integrating cultural and Indigenous knowledge in ecological research and the valuable contribution it makes to our understanding of the natural world.
Original reference: J. Zool., https://doi.org/10.1111/jzo.13093 (2023)
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