#forktaileddrongo

In the Kalahari Desert, life can be hard and it can be difficult to get food. So when an animal finds a good meal, it will relish in it in all its glory.

But what happens if a fellow animal neighbor warns that animal that there’s impending danger while it’s eating that delicious piece of hard-earned food?

Let’s provide a relatable human example. You’re drinking your delicious beverage while walking to work, and your friend yells at you and says that a crazy car driver zooming on the streets; the car is about to turn the corner and you’re about to be in the car’s path.

What do you do? Do you A) ignore your friend, drink your beverage, and go on your merry way, or B) listen to your friend and drop your beverage to avoid the potential of getting seriously injured? If you choose option A (drinking the beverage), you get your reward of drinking your beverage but you might be in danger getting run over by a car. If you choose option B (listen to your friend), you lose your beverage but might be saved by your friend’s advice.

But then wrap this around your brain: what if your friend is lying to you that there is an actual car? Dun dun duuunnn! Cue the gasps.

Okay, maybe this would never happen to you. But this type of scenario commonly happens in the animal world.

Bring in two uncanny animals of the Kalahari Desert whose lives are intertwined by food and fear: the Meerkat (Suricata suricatta) and the Drongo (Dicrurus adsimilis). 

Meerkats were probably made popular by Disney’s Lion King, Timon. Meerkats live in social groups on the African desert landscape; they work together to help each other to find food, take care of their young, and keep a look out for predators.

See the resemblance? Image from Disney’s Lion King 1994

The Drongo is a little less well-known. A drongo is a type of songbird with glossy black feathers and garnet-red eyes, and are common in Southern Africa.

Both animals share the same tastes for insects and scorpions. But often times in the desert, food is scarce; we’ve all got to eat, even our predators. 

Meerkats generally fall prey to other bigger animals like hawks and eagles.

Wouldn’t it be great to have some kind of alarm to know when a predator is around?

Meerkats rely on the “sentry” to look out for predators; they also rely on other animals, like the drongo, and their warning calls to inform them of when there’s a predator around.

The drongo will make a warning call and warn the meerkats of danger.

But the drongo has got to eat too. That’s when it become cunning.

When this crafty bird gets hungry (and/or lazy), it will make a false alarm call to make animals drop their hard-earned kill and run from the scene; the drongo will then swoop in and picks up the meal.

And if that is not enough to trick the wisest of meerkats, the drongo can actually mimic the alarm call of a meerkat.

Let us let Sir David Attenborough show this out in the field:

Researchers classify the drongo as a ‘kleptoparasite' - an animal that steals food from another creature that has caught it. Kleptoparasitism can happen to between two different species, like the drongo and the meerkat, or between the same species; you actually see this a lot between seagulls (think about your days on the beach and you spot a hoard of seagulls fighting over a caught crab or a stolen French fry).

Studies on kleptoparasitism in the animal world have raised new perspectives in field of behavioral ecology in the past decade. All animals display signals, often times associated with mating. However, there are animals that display dishonest signaling or in common terms, deception. Then it becomes a question of costs and benefits to both the sender and the receiver of the signal.

Take the meerkat’s perspective, the receiver of the signal: If the drongo is telling the truth and the meerkat leaves, the meerkat is saved. If the drongo is telling the truth and the meerkat stays, the meerkat gets eaten. If the drongo is lying and the meerkat leaves, the meerkat doesn’t get food. If the drongo is lying and the meerkat stays, the meerkats gets food.

Now let’s look at the flip side, the drongo making the dishonest signal:

If the drongo is lying and the meerkat leaves, the drongo gets food. If the drongo is lying and the meerkat stays, the drongo gets no food.

Read more about the meerkat and drongo relationship from this scientific journal article: Flower, T. (2011). Fork-tailed drongos use deceptive mimicked alarm calls to steal food. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences, 278(1711): 1548-1555.