ArticleBiology letters2015
The costs of avian brood parasitism explain variation in egg rejection behaviour in hosts.
Article in Biology letters, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed, 46 citations in OpenAlex.
- Female Cuckoo Calls Are More Effective at Attracting Breeding Male Cuckoos and Their Hosts Than Male Cuckoo Calls.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Egg shape and color mediate acceptance thresholds in diverse avian host species with different rates of antiparasitic egg rejection.The Journal of experimental biology · 2025Article
- Cuckoo Hosts Fine-Tune Their Egg Rejection After Experiencing a Parasitism Event.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Egg retrieval in ground-nesting cuckoo hosts: can two species of buntings accurately identify and retrieve their own eggs?Animal cognition · 2024Article
- Nest architecture influences host use by avian brood parasites and is shaped by coevolutionary dynamics.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Brood parasitism and egg recognition in three bunting hosts of the cuckoos.Ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Thicker eggshells are not predicted by host egg ejection behaviour in four species of Australian cuckoo.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- The ghosts of parasitism past: lingering frontline anti-brood parasite defenses in a former host.Current zoology · 2021Article
- Host and brood parasite coevolutionary interactions covary with comparative patterns of the avian visual system.Biology letters · 2021Article
- Egg recognition abilities of tit species in the Paridae family: do Indomalayan tits exhibit higher recognition than Palearctic tits?Zoological research · 2020Article
- From micro- to macroevolution: brood parasitism as a driver of phenotypic diversity in birds.Current zoology · 2020Article
- Defences against brood parasites from a social immunity perspective.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2019Review
- Probing the Limits of Egg Recognition Using Egg Rejection Experiments Along Phenotypic Gradients.Journal of visualized experiments : JoVE · 2018Article
- Article
- Egg rejection in blackbirds Turdus merula: a by-product of conspecific parasitism or successful resistance against interspecific brood parasites?Frontiers in zoology · 2016Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Many bird species can reject foreign eggs from their nests. This behaviour is thought to have evolved in response to brood parasites, birds that lay their eggs in the nest of other species. However, not all hosts of brood parasites evict parasitic eggs. In this study, we collate data from egg rejection experiments on 198 species, and perform comparative analyses to understand the conditions under which egg rejection evolves. We found evidence, we believe for the first time in a large-scale comparative analysis, that (i) non-current host species have rejection rates as high as current hosts, (ii) egg rejection is more likely to evolve when the parasite is relatively large compared with its host and (iii) egg rejection is more likely to evolve when the parasite chick evicts all the host eggs from the nest, such as in cuckoos. Our results suggest that the interactions between brood parasites and their hosts have driven the evolution of egg rejection and that variation in the costs inflicted by parasites is fundamental to explaining why only some host species evolve egg rejection.
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