Claire Spottiswoode

Claire N. Spottiswoode, FRS is a South African evolutionary ecologist and naturalist, specialising in African birds and species interactions. She holds the Pola Pasvolsky Chair in Conservation Biology at the University of Cape Town,^[1] and is also a visiting research associate at the Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge.^[2]

Spottiswoode in 2001

Biography

Spottiswoode studied zoology and botany at the University of Cape Town, graduating in 2001 with Bachelor of Science and Honours degrees.^[3] She then undertook a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree at the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Nick Davies, which she completed in 2005.^[1] Her doctoral thesis was titled "Behavioural ecology and tropical life-histories in African birds".^[4]

She remained at the University of Cambridge after completing her PhD,^[1] taking up a junior research fellowship at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.^[5] She held the Royal Society's Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship from 2008 to 2013.^[6] In 2013, she was awarded a L'Oreal "Women in Science" Fellowship.^[7] By 2016, she was a senior research fellow at Magdalene College, Cambridge.^[8][9] That same year, she returned to the University of Cape Town to take up the Pola Pasvolsky Chair in Conservation Biology at its FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology.^[1] She continued her association with Cambridge as a visiting research associate in the Department of Zoology and her fellowship at Magdalene College.^[2]

In 2017, Spottiswoode was awarded the Bicentenary Medal by the Linnean Society of London.^[5][10] In 2025, she was elected Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS), the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences.^[11]

Selected works

• Spottiswoode, C. (2004). "Extrapair paternity, migration, and breeding synchrony in birds". Behavioral Ecology. 15 (1): 41–57. doi:10.1093/beheco/arg100.
• Cohen, Callan; Spottiswoode, Claire; Rossouw, Jonathan (2006). Southern African Birdfinder: Where to find 1400 bird species in southern Africa and Madagascar. Johannesburg: Penguin Random House South Africa. ISBN 9781868727254.
• Tobias, Joseph A.; Seddon, Nathalie; Spottiswoode, Claire N.; Pilgrim, John D.; Fishpool, Lincoln D. C.; Collar, Nigel J. (2010). "Quantitative criteria for species delimitation" (PDF). Ibis. 152 (4): 724–746.
• Spottiswoode, Claire N.; Stevens, Martin (2010). "Visual modeling shows that avian host parents use multiple visual cues in rejecting parasitic eggs". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 107 (19): 8672–8676. doi:10.1073/pnas.0910486107.
• Spottiswoode, Claire N.; Stevens, Martin (2011). "How to evade a coevolving brood parasite: egg discrimination versus egg variability as host defences". Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. 278 (1724): 3566–3573. doi:10.1098/rspb.2011.0401. PMC 3189372.
• Spottiswoode, Claire N.; Stevens, Martin (2012). "Host-Parasite Arms Races and Rapid Changes in Bird Egg Appearance". The American Naturalist. 179 (5): 633–648. doi:10.1086/665031.
• Spottiswoode, Claire N.; Begg, Keith S.; Begg, Colleen M. (2016). "Reciprocal signaling in honeyguide-human mutualism". Science. 353 (6297): 387–389. doi:10.1126/science.aaf4885.