Nestling Discrimination and Provisioning Allocation to Cuculuscanorus by Acrocephalus Orientalis Hosts
Birds have multiple kin discrimination mechanisms for recognizing their offspring(e.g.,begging calls,phenotypic characteristics,nest location),which ultimate influences their parental care strategies.However,in brood parasitic birds,there is a general lack of nestling discrimination by hosts of Cuculuscanorus.One point of view is that the nestlings of Cuculuscanorus arched the host eggs(or nestlings)out of the nest,and the host parent birds lacked phenotypic contrast,which led to the host performance recognition error,unable to identify parasitic birds.In this study,a major host of the Cuculuscanorus,the Acrocephalus orientalis,was used as the subject of experiments to verify the nestling recognition and parental provisioning strategies of the Acrocephalus orientalis.Dring 2014 to 2016,experimental manipulations were conducted on 26 Acrocephalus orientalis nests in the Liaohekou National Nature Reserve.Our results showed that the Acrocephalus orientalis lacked the ability to recognize both natural and artificially transferred Cuculuscanorus chicks and showed no significant difference in their chick-rearing ratios for both the Cuculuscanorus and the Acrocephalus orientalis chicks.Furthermore,the parasitic status of the nest did not affect the allocation of parental care by the Acrocephalus orientalis to Cuculuscanorus chicks.However,we found the nest locationi(t=1.314,P=0.039)had a significant effect on parental provisioning allocation rate.The proportion of feeding to the Cuculuscanorus chicks in the original nest was significantly higher than that in the newly-added nest,indicating that the Acrocephalus orientalis tended provisioning more prey to the chicks in the original nest,which suggests that nest location is an important cue for birds to adjust their parental care.
万方数据
维普
