How the Greater honeyguide bird lead humans to find honey (Amazing Animal Adaptations #5)

We see a lot of mutualistic symbiosis in nature, but these usually do not include humans. However, in this post I will tell you a bit about one of the amazing symbiotic relationships in which humans are included. There is a bird called the greater honeyguide (Indicator indicator) that is found in the Sub-Saharan Africa. This bird lives in a symbiosis with some African tribes, such as the Boran people of Kenya.

The greater honeyguide. Image by Wilferd Duckitt, posted with the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

The bird mainly feeds on contents found within bee colonies, and is even one of a very few birds that can digest bee wax. The problem with this strategy is that it needs to find abandoned colonies, which is rare. In order to bypass this problem it has developed an amazing adaptation where it can lead humans and other mammals to find a bee hive. The mammal will take the honey from the beehive, while the bird gets all the leftovers.

Before we get into more details, I want to clear up some source issues on this symbiosis. As I said above, the greater honeyguide lead mammals to beehives. Some sources claims they only lead humans to beehives, while other sources claims this adaptation was used to lead the honey badger / ratel (Mellivora capensis) to the beehives. I’m not sure which source is correct, but for this post I use sources from Ecology: Concepts and applications, sixth edition. More info about this source is on the bottom of my post. Either way, the greater honeyguide lead humans to beehives, and might also lead ratels to them.

How the greater honeyguide lead humans to beehives

The behavior to team up to find wild beehives can be initiated by both species, either the bird or the human. The birds who wants to get the attention of a human will fly close to it while making noises to get its attention. It will then fly in a determined direction, hoping the human will follow. After about one minute it will stop on a perch and call for the human.

If the human wants to initiate the team-up, they will make a whistle sound, known as fuulido. This whistle has been shown to double the rate at which humans encounter the greater honeyguides. The fuulido is very loud, and can be heard from over one kilometer away, so there are good chances to attract the birds.

Once they have established contact, the greater honeyguide will guide the human by calling, displaying its tail feather and wait on perches. The human will keep the bird interested in the cooperation by making noises and talking to the bird. This sequence will be repeated until they reach the wild beehive. Studies have shown that the greater honeyguides will lead the humans in a pretty much straight line to get beehive, so it got a good sense of directions before initiating the interaction.

While getting closer to the beehive, the distance between each stop will be reduced, so the human will know that they are about to reach the beehive. It will also fly closer to the ground, and land on lower perches. This is a nice way to know that you are getting closer, but the problem is that the birds sometimes will trick the human into thinking they are somewhat close, because they know that the human will not be interested if it is far away.

Once at the beehive, the greater honeyguide will fly around the tree containing the hive, while making distinct “indication calls”. After making a few of these, it will remain silent and stop responding to the human interaction. At this point the human has been lead to the hive, and can harvest it for honey, while the bird will get all the delicious leftovers. While foraging the beehive, humans will use smoke to incapacitate the bees, so eating the eggs, hive parts and wax is safe for the bird.

Is it effective?

When scientists studied the behavior, they found that the average time to find a beehive was 3.2 hours. If humans were to look for beehives without the help of a greater honeyguide, it would on average take them 8.9 hours per hive, so it is definitely an effective method to get honey!

Does this really count as a symbiosis?

When we are in the field of ecology, the most common use of the term symbiosis is something along the lines: Persistent interaction between individuals of different species. This would definitely include this interaction!

I think this symbiosis is a really cool adaptation by the greater honeyguide, and show that birds can have pretty complex behavior!

Thanks for reading

Thank you for reading my post! I hope you liked it, and do not be scared to leave comments or questions below. I will try to answer them as best as I am able to.

Amazing Animal Adaptations

This post is part of a series called Amazing Animal Adaptations. I try to highlight some cool adaptations that we find in the nature, so make sure to follow me if you like these kinds of posts.

Previous entries in the series:

1. The incredible strength of the Coconut crab.
2. The biological secrets behind the hibernation of brown bears.
3. How clownfish changes their sex depending on the social group.
4. Buffalo herds use a voting system to select their next grazing spot.

Sources

• For this post I used a book called Ecology: Concepts and Applications, sixth edition by Manuel C. Molles Jr. The information is found in Chapter 15: Mutualism, page 346 – 348.
• The Wikipedia page on Greater honeyguides also has a lot of information, but I found some of it to contradict my sources from the textbook, so make sure to check the facts on Wikipedia before blindly believing it.