Rearing a virulent common cuckoo is not extra costly for its only cavity-nesting host.

ABSTRACT: Virulent brood parasites refrain from arduous parental care, often kill host progeny and inflict rearing costs upon their hosts. Quantifying the magnitude of such costs across the whole period of care (from incubation through to parasite fledgling independence) is essential for understanding the selection pressures on hosts to evolve antiparasitic defences. Despite the central importance of such costs for our understanding of coevolutionary dynamics, they have not yet been comprehensively quantified in any host of any avian brood parasite. We quantified parasite-rearing costs in common redstarts Phoenicurus phoenicurus raising either parasitic common cuckoo Cuculus canorus or their own chicks throughout the complete breeding cycle, and used multiple cost parameters for each b

SUBMITTER: Samas P 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6234889 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature