Why cuckoos remove host eggs: Biting eggs facilitates faster parasitic egg-laying.

ABSTRACT: Brood parasitism by cuckoos relies on manipulating hosts to raise their offspring and has evolved stunning adaptations to aid in their deception. The fact that cuckoos usually but not always, remove one or two host eggs while laying their eggs has been a longstanding focus of intensive research. However, the benefit of this behavior remains elusive. Moreover, the recently proposed help delivery hypothesis, predicting that egg removal by cuckoos may decrease the egg-laying duration in the parasitism process caused by biting action, lacks experimental verification. Therefore, in this study, we examined the effects of egg removal/biting on the egg-laying speed in the common cuckoo (Cuculus canorus) to experimentally test this hypothesis. We compared the duration of cuckoo egg-laying in

SUBMITTER: Wang L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10716810 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature