Hosted by the School of Biological Sciences

Where parental care is given, there is an opportunity to steal it.

The concept of avian brood parasitism initially puzzled the likes of Charles Darwin, and it took many years before we began to understand both how it evolved, and how it persists. Brood parasitism is a strategy used by some bird species in which they lay their eggs in the nests of other bird species (the host), leaving the host bird to incubate and raise the parasitic chicks. This behaviour allows the parasitic bird to avoid the energy and time costs associated with raising its own offspring. Brood parasites deploy a series of mechanisms to trick foster parents into incubating their eggs and rearing their young. This can include adaptations to the eggshell to mimic the host eggs, internal incubation of their eggs, and thicker eggshells to evade host puncture. I will present data on our recent work showing how the embryos of brood parasites can develop quicker and hatch earlier than their hosts’ eggs, and how the recently hatched chick of the parasite – blind and naked – sets out about dispatching the host eggs and young. Our data focus on developmental aspects of the parasites and their hosts (metabolism, muscular twitching and gas exchange), and structural elements of the eggshells (surface roughness, wettability and calcium content).