Do oxpeckers help or mostly just freeload?
By Susan Milius
Birds that ride around on large African mammals picking off ticks provide a common textbook example of mutualism, but the animals’ interactions may not exemplify such a happy partnership after all.
Keeping the red-billed oxpeckers away from oxen didn’t typically increase tick infestation, Paul Weeks found in graduate work for the University of Cambridge in England. Weeks also observed that excluding the oxpeckers speeded healing of skin wounds of various causes, he reports in the March-April issue of Behavioral Ecology.