Conspecific Brood Parasitism in Common Coots and Responses to Different Types of Parasitic Eggs
Conspecific brood parasitism is a conditional reproductive strategy of birds with specific evolutionary history and regional characteristics.As a widely distributed wetland waterfowl in palearctic realm,the strategies of conspecific brood parasitism and antiparasitic behavior of common coots(Fulica atra)are of great significance for the verification of the hy-pothesis of brood parasitism.In this study,the identification ability of common coots to different types of parasitic eggs was explored through model and real egg placement experiments,and the parasitic defense strategies at different stages of breeding were analyzed.The results showed that common coots had a high frequency of conspecific brood parasitism,and the behavior of rejecting eggs included burying eggs and ejecting parasitic eggs out of the nest.Common coots had a strong ability to recognize model eggs,especially there was no false rejection of eggs in the dark model,while the recogni-tion ability of real eggs was relatively weak,there was a significant difference in the success rate of rejecting model eggs and real eggs(χ2=4.304,p=0.038).The response of common coots to rejecting eggs varied greatly at different breeding stages.The intensity of rejecting eggs at the laying period was higher than that of incubation period,the success rate of re-jecting eggs in the two stages was significantly different(χ2=9.580,p=0.002).The common coots host can reduce the in-fluence of conspecific brood parasitism through parasitic egg recognition and egg rejection behavior,and weigh the cost of egg rejection defense,adopt behavioral adaptation strategies that are beneficial to their own fitness at different breeding stages.
Common coots(Fulica atra)Conspecific brood parasit-ismParasitic eggModel eggEgg recognition
NETL
NSTL
万方数据
维普
