Jessica van der Wal
Postdoctoral Fellow, FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology, University of Cape Town
A sweet deal: how humans cooperate with wild birds to find honey
Mutualism and reciprocal signalling between human honey-hunters and greater honeyguide birds to access the content of wild bees’ nests.
Jessica is postdoctoral fellow at the University of Cape Town researching the ecology and evolution of the mutualism between human honey-hunters and greater honeyguides in Africa. She is especially interested in understanding the human cultural variation that sustains this remarkable human-bird cooperation, such as the calls used to communicate with honeyguides. She is also passionate about exploring safeguarding measures to prevent the human-honeyguide mutualism to become extinct. Jessica employs an interdisciplinary approach to address her research questions, integrating ideas and methodologies from a variety of academic disciplines such as biology, anthropology, linguistics, as well as citizen science.
