ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2014
Cryptic cuckoo eggs hide from competing cuckoos.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed.
- Multiparasitism: why do interspecific brood parasites lay eggs so frequently in already parasitized host nests?Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- Egg Spots Are Important Cues for Egg Recognition in Barn Swallows.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Oriental reed warblers retain strong egg recognition abilities during the nestling stage.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Revealing the roles of egg darkness and nest similarity for a cryptic parasite egg versus host's cognition: an alternate coevolutionary trajectory.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Fatal mobbing and attack of the common cuckoo by its warbler hosts.Ecology and evolution · 2022Article
- Discrimination and ejection of eggs and nestlings by the fan-tailed gerygone from New Caledonia.Current zoology · 2021Article
- Imperfect mimicry of host begging calls by a brood parasitic cuckoo: a cue for nestling rejection by hosts?Current zoology · 2021Article
- No evidence of host-specific egg mimicry in Asian koels.PloS one · 2021Article
- Common cuckoo females remove more conspicuous eggs during parasitism.Royal Society open science · 2021Article
- From micro- to macroevolution: brood parasitism as a driver of phenotypic diversity in birds.Current zoology · 2020Article
- Egg laying behavior of common cuckoos (Zoological research · 2020Article
- Visual discrimination of polymorphic nestlings in a cuckoo-host system.Scientific reports · 2018Article
- True recognition of nestlings by hosts selects for mimetic cuckoo chicks.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2018Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Interspecific arms races between cuckoos and their hosts have produced remarkable examples of mimicry, with parasite eggs evolving to match host egg appearance and so evade removal by hosts. Certain bronze-cuckoo species, however, lay eggs that are cryptic rather than mimetic. These eggs are coated in a low luminance pigment that camouflages them within the dark interiors of hosts' nests. We investigated whether cuckoo egg crypsis is likely to have arisen from the same coevolutionary processes known to favour egg mimicry. We added high and low luminance-painted eggs to the nests of large-billed gerygones (Gerygone magnirostris), a host of the little bronze-cuckoo (Chalcites minutillus). Gerygones rarely rejected either egg type, and did not reject natural cuckoo eggs. Cuckoos, by contrast, regularly removed an egg from clutches before laying their own and were five times more likely to remove a high luminance model than its low luminance counterpart. Given that we found one-third of all parasitized nests were exploited by multiple cuckoos, our results suggest that competition between cuckoos has been the key selective agent for egg crypsis. In such intraspecific arms races, crypsis may be favoured over mimicry because it can reduce the risk of egg removal to levels below chance.
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