scholarly journals The coevolutionary biology of brood parasitism: a call for integration

2019 ◽  
Vol 374 (1769) ◽  
pp. 20180190 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rose Thorogood ◽  
Claire N. Spottiswoode ◽  
Steven J. Portugal ◽  
Ros Gloag
Keyword(s):  
Parental Care ◽  
Brood Parasitism ◽  
Evolutionary History ◽  
Social Evolution ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Theme Issue ◽  
Brood Parasites ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ancient Times ◽  
Illuminating System

Obligate brood-parasitic cheats have fascinated natural historians since ancient times. Passing on the costs of parental care to others occurs widely in birds, insects and fish, and often exerts selection pressure on hosts that in turn evolve defences. Brood parasites have therefore provided an illuminating system for researching coevolution. Nevertheless, much remains unknown about how ecology and evolutionary history constrain or facilitate brood parasitism, or the mechanisms that shape or respond to selection. In this special issue, we bring together examples from across the animal kingdom to illustrate the diverse ways in which recent research is addressing these gaps. This special issue also considers how research on brood parasitism may benefit from, and in turn inform, related fields such as social evolution and immunity. Here, we argue that progress in our understanding of coevolution would benefit from the increased integration of ideas across taxonomic boundaries and across Tinbergen’s Four Questions: mechanism, ontogeny, function and phylogeny of brood parasitism. We also encourage renewed vigour in uncovering the natural history of the majority of the world's brood parasites that remain little-known. Indeed, it seems very likely that some of nature’s brood parasites remain entirely unknown, because otherwise we are left with a puzzle: if parental care is so costly, why is brood parasitism not more common?This article is part of the theme issue ‘The coevolutionary biology of brood parasitism: from mechanism to pattern’.

scholarly journals Patterns of host use by brood parasitic Maculinea butterflies across Europe

2019 ◽  
Vol 374 (1769) ◽  
pp. 20180202 ◽  
Author(s):  
András Tartally ◽  
Jeremy A. Thomas ◽  
Christian Anton ◽  
Emilio Balletto ◽  
Francesca Barbero ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Brood Parasitism ◽  
Geographical Variation ◽  
Host Switching ◽  
Host Use ◽  
Theme Issue ◽  
Geographic Mosaic ◽  
New Host ◽  
Brood Parasites ◽  
Comprehensive Survey ◽  
Maculinea Butterflies

The range of hosts exploited by a parasite is determined by several factors, including host availability, infectivity and exploitability. Each of these can be the target of natural selection on both host and parasite, which will determine the local outcome of interactions, and potentially lead to coevolution. However, geographical variation in host use and specificity has rarely been investigated. Maculinea (= Phengaris ) butterflies are brood parasites of Myrmica ants that are patchily distributed across the Palæarctic and have been studied extensively in Europe. Here, we review the published records of ant host use by the European Maculinea species, as well as providing new host ant records for more than 100 sites across Europe. This comprehensive survey demonstrates that while all but one of the Myrmica species found on Maculinea sites have been recorded as hosts, the most common is often disproportionately highly exploited. Host sharing and host switching are both relatively common, but there is evidence of specialization at many sites, which varies among Maculinea species. We show that most Maculinea display the features expected for coevolution to occur in a geographic mosaic, which has probably allowed these rare butterflies to persist in Europe. This article is part of the theme issue ‘The coevolutionary biology of brood parasitism: from mechanism to pattern’.

scholarly journals Parasitic cuckoo catfish exploit parental responses to stray offspring

2019 ◽  
Vol 374 (1769) ◽  
pp. 20180412 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Polačik ◽  
M. Reichard ◽  
C. Smith ◽  
R. Blažek
Keyword(s):  
Brood Parasitism ◽  
Lake Tanganyika ◽  
Buccal Cavity ◽  
Brood Parasite ◽  
Theme Issue ◽  
Brood Parasites ◽  
Parental Response ◽  
Interspecific Brood Parasitism ◽  
Late Developmental Stage ◽  
Parental Responses

Interspecific brood parasitism occurs in several independent lineages of birds and social insects, putatively evolving from intraspecific brood parasitism. The cuckoo catfish, Synodontis multipunctatus , the only known obligatory non-avian brood parasite, exploits mouthbrooding cichlid fishes in Lake Tanganyika, despite the absence of parental care in its evolutionary lineage (family Mochokidae). Cuckoo catfish participate in host spawning events, with their eggs subsequently collected and brooded by parental cichlids, though they can later be selectively rejected by the host. One scenario for the origin of brood parasitism in cuckoo catfish is through predation of cichlid eggs during spawning, eventually resulting in a spatial and temporal match in oviposition by host and parasite. Here we demonstrate experimentally that, uniquely among all known brood parasites, cuckoo catfish have the capacity to re-infect their hosts at a late developmental stage following egg rejection. We show that cuckoo catfish offspring can survive outside the host buccal cavity and re-infect parental hosts at a later incubation phase by exploiting the strong parental instinct of hosts to collect stray offspring. This finding implies an alternative evolutionary origin for cuckoo catfish brood parasitism, with the parental response of host cichlids facilitating its evolution. This article is part of the theme issue ‘The coevolutionary biology of brood parasitism: from mechanism to pattern’.

scholarly journals Pattern, process, inference and prediction in extinction biology

2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 20160828 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry W. Brook ◽  
John Alroy
Keyword(s):  
Natural Science ◽  
Evolutionary History ◽  
Extinction Risk ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Effective Protection ◽  
Practical Applications ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Patterns And Processes

Extinction is a key feature of the evolutionary history of life, and assessments of extinction risk are essential for the effective protection of biodiversity. The goal in assembling this special issue of Biology Letters was to highlight problems and questions at the research frontier of extinction biology, with an emphasis on recent developments in the methodology of inferring the patterns and processes of extinction from a background of often noisy and sparse data. In selecting topics, we sought to illustrate how extinction is not simply a self-evident phenomenon, but the subject of a dynamic and quantitatively rigorous field of natural science, with practical applications to conservation.

scholarly journals Under the radar: detection avoidance in brood parasitic bees

2019 ◽  
Vol 374 (1769) ◽  
pp. 20180196 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica R. Litman
Keyword(s):  
Brood Parasitism ◽  
Solitary Bees ◽  
General Context ◽  
Brood Parasite ◽  
Theme Issue ◽  
Evolutionary Transitions ◽  
Brood Parasites ◽  
Selective Pressures ◽  
Specialized Form ◽  
Fierce Competition

Brood parasitism is a specialized form of parasitism in which the offspring of a parasite develops on the food provisions gathered by a host species for its own young. Obligate brood parasitic lineages have lost the ability to acquire provisions for their young and thus rely entirely on the location of an appropriate host to serve as a food-provider. Solitary bees provide some of the most fascinating examples of brood parasitism in animals. Most solitary bees build and provision their own nests. Some, however, usurp the nests of other species of bees. These brood parasites, or ‘cuckoo’ bees, deposit their eggs on the pollen provisions collected by a host bee for her own offspring. The provisions stored by the host bee are not sufficient to sustain the development of both the host's larva and that of the brood parasite and the parasite must kill the offspring of its host in order to obtain enough nourishment to complete its development. As a consequence, there is fierce competition between the host bee seeking to protect her nest from attack and the brood parasite seeking to avoid detection by the host in order to successfully deposit her eggs in an appropriate nest. In this paper, I review the behaviours that allow brood parasitic bees to escape detection by their hosts. Identifying these behaviours, and placing them within the general context of strategies employed by brood parasitic bees to parasitize the nests of their hosts, is key to understanding how brood parasitic lineages may have evolved from nest-building ancestors, decrypting the selective pressures that drive evolutionary transitions from one strategy to another and, more broadly, revealing how similar selective pressures in widely divergent lineages of animals have given rise to remarkably convergent behaviours. This article is part of the theme issue ‘The coevolutionary biology of brood parasitism: from mechanism to pattern’.

scholarly journals Defences against brood parasites from a social immunity perspective

2019 ◽  
Vol 374 (1769) ◽  
pp. 20180207 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. C. Cotter ◽  
D. Pincheira-Donoso ◽  
R. Thorogood
Keyword(s):  
Immune Responses ◽  
Brood Parasitism ◽  
Inclusive Fitness ◽  
Social Immunity ◽  
Theme Issue ◽  
Brood Parasites ◽  
Structured Groups ◽  
Parasitic Interactions ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Multicellular Organisms

Parasitic interactions are so ubiquitous that all multicellular organisms have evolved a system of defences to reduce their costs, whether the parasites they encounter are the classic parasites which feed on the individual, or brood parasites which usurp parental care. Many parallels have been drawn between defences deployed against both types of parasite, but typically, while defences against classic parasites have been selected to protect survival, those against brood parasites have been selected to protect the parent's inclusive fitness, suggesting that the selection pressures they impose are fundamentally different. However, there is another class of defences against classic parasites that have specifically been selected to protect an individual's inclusive fitness, known as social immunity . Social immune responses include the anti-parasite defences typically provided for others in kin-structured groups, such as the antifungal secretions produced by termite workers to protect the brood. Defences against brood parasites, therefore, are more closely aligned with social immune responses. Much like social immunity, host defences against brood parasitism are employed by a donor (a parent) for the benefit of one or more recipients (typically kin), and as with social defences against classic parasites, defences have therefore evolved to protect the donor's inclusive fitness, not the survival or ultimately the fitness of individual recipients This can lead to severe conflicts between the different parties, whose interests are not always aligned. Here, we consider defences against brood parasitism in the light of social immunity, at different stages of parasite encounter, addressing where conflicts occur and how they might be resolved. We finish with considering how this approach could help us to address longstanding questions in our understanding of brood parasitism. This article is part of the theme issue ‘The coevolutionary biology of brood parasitism: from mechanism to pattern’.

scholarly journals НОВЫЕ АРХЕОЗООЛОГИЧЕСКИЕ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЯ СРЕДНЕВЕКОВОГО БИЛЯРА

2021 ◽  
pp. 90-95
Author(s):  
Диляра Наилевна Шаймуратова ◽  
Игорь Васильевич Аськеев ◽  
Зуфар Гумарович Шакиров
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Ancient Dna ◽  
Evolutionary History ◽  
Archaeological Sites ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Middle Volga Region ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
History Of ◽  
Molecular Assessment ◽  
Middle Volga

В статье представлено новое исследование остатков рыб и птиц из раскопа XLIV Билярского городища, заложенного с целью изучения крупного кирпичного здания, который располагался в так называемом «Внутреннем городе» – наиболее статусной его части. Целью работы являлся комплексный анализ фаунистических остатков, извлеченных из культурного слоя методом послойного отбора с просеиванием. По костным остаткам и чешуе определено 23 вида рыб с преобладанием остатковкрупноразмерных видов: севрюги, судака, стерляди и белорыбицы. Преобладание крупноразмерных видов указывает на то, что промысел велся на Волге и Каме, и основной состав рыб, употреблявшихся на городище, был привозной. Видовой состав птиц высок и разнообразен – 40 видов диких и 3 вида домашних птиц с доминированием домашней курицы. Среди диких птиц интересны находки элементов скелета хищных птиц из отряда Ястребиных и отряда Соколов, что указывает на наличие соколиной охоты на данном местонахождении и его высокий социальный статус. Библиографические ссылки Аськеев И.В., Галимова Д.Н., Аськеев О.В. Ихтиофауна позднего голоцена Средневолжского бассейна (по материалам археологических раскопок) // Зоологический журнал. 2013а. Т. 92. №. 9. С. 1014−1030. Аськеев И.В., Галимова Д.Н., Аськеев О.В. Птицы Среднего Поволжья в V–XVIII вв. н.э. (по материалам археологических раскопок) // Поволжская археология. 2013б. № 3 (5). С. 116–144. Аськеев И.В., Галимова Д.Н., Аськеев О.В. Домашние и дикие птицы из средневековых археологических памятников Среднего Поволжья // Динамика современных экосистем в голоцене / Материалы Третьей Всероссийской научной конференции (с международным участием). Казань: Отечество, 2013в. С. 72–77. Бадеев Д.Ю., Худяков А.В., Шакиров З.Г. Археологические исследования на территории Билярского комплекса в 2016–2017 гг. // Археологические открытия. 2017 год / Отв. ред. Н.В. Лопатин. М.: ИА РАН, 2019. С. 331–334. Галимова Д.Н., Аськеев И.В., Аськеев О.В. Изучение остатков рыб и птиц из археологических раскопок древних городов Биляр, Болгар и Свияжск // Труды IV (XX) Всероссийского археологического съезда в Казани. Т. V. / Отв. ред. А.П. Деревянко, Н.А. Макаров, А.Г. Ситдиков. Казань: Отечество, 2015. С. 35−37. Худяков А.В., Набиуллин Н.Г., Шакиров З.Г., Шорохов М.В. Археологические Раскопки на территории Билярского городища и Балынгузского кладбища в 2018–2019 гг. // Археологические открытия. 2019 год. (В печати). Хузин Ф.Ш., Шакиров З.Г. Археологические исследования на Билярском городище // Археологические открытия. 2015 год / Отв. ред. Н.В. Лопатин. М.: ИА РАН, 2017. С. 326–328. Шаймуратова Д.Н. Особенности изучения субфоссильных остатков рыб и птиц из археологических памятников Среднего Поволжья и их экологическая интерпретация // Российский журнал прикладной экологии. 2016. № 1. С. 8–13. Galimova D.N., Askeyev I.V. and Askeyev O.V. Bird Remains from 5th – 17th Century AD Archaeological Sites in the Middle Volga Region of Russia // International Journal Osteoarchaeology. Special Issue. 2014. P. 347–357. Honka J., Heino M.T., Kvist L., Askeyev I.V., Shaymuratova D.N., Askeyev O.V., Askeyev A.O.,Heikkinen M.E., Searle J.B., Aspi J. Over a thousand years of evolutionary history of domestic geese from Russian archaeological sites, analysed using ancient DNA. 2018. Genes. №9 (7). P. 367. Lebrasseur O., Shaymuratova D., Askeyev A., Asylgaraeva G., Frantz L., Larson G., Askeyev O., Askeyev I. A zooarchaelogical and molecular assessment of ancient Chicken remains from Russia // Поволжская археология. 2021. №1 (35). С. 216–231. Serjeantson D. Birds. Cambridge Manuals in Archaeology. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 512 р.

scholarly journals Laying Plasticity in an Avian Brood Parasite

The Auk ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 122 (2) ◽  
pp. 566-570
Author(s):  
Dan W. Forman
Keyword(s):  
Parental Care ◽  
Brood Parasitism ◽  
Bird Species ◽  
Behavioral Development ◽  
Geographic Range ◽  
Brood Parasite ◽  
Vertebrate Species ◽  
Conspecific Brood Parasitism ◽  
Brood Parasites ◽  
Ecological Conditions

Abstract Females of some bird species “steal“ the parental care of other breeding individuals by laying eggs parasitically in their nests. In most populations, conspecific brood parasites lay parasitically before laying in their own nests. By contrast, in a young and expanding Common Moorhen (Gallinula chloropus) population, 17.4% (n = 8) of brood parasites laid parasitically when their own clutches were currently being incubated, and 13.1% (n = 6) laid parasitically when they were tending to their young. This result differs from previous data on conspecific brood parasitism in this (and other) avian species and suggests that sitespecific ecological conditions exert differing selective influences on the behavioral development of populations. The behavior adopted by individual vertebrate species may not, therefore, be rigidly fixed throughout their geographic range.

scholarly journals Losing maternal care: Neotenic gene expression in the preoptic area of avian brood parasites

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen S. Lynch ◽  
Lauren A. O’Connell ◽  
Matthew I. M. Louder ◽  
Anthony Pellicano ◽  
Annmarie Gaglio ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Gene Expression ◽  
Parental Care ◽  
Maternal Behavior ◽  
Brood Parasitism ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Preoptic Area ◽  
Expression Patterns ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Gene Expression Patterns ◽  
Brood Parasites

AbstractParental care for is critical for offspring survival in many species. However, parental behaviors have been lost in roughly 1% of avian species known as the obligate brood parasites. To shed light on molecular and neurobiological mechanisms mediating brood parasitic behavior, brain gene expression patterns between two brood parasitic species and one closely related non-parasitic Icterid (blackbird) species were compared. Our analyses focused on gene expression changes specifically in the preoptic area (POA), a brain region known to play a critical role in maternal behavior across vertebrates. Using comparative transcriptomic approaches, we identified gene expression patterns associated with brood parasitism and evaluated two alternative explanations for the evolution of brood parasitism: reduced expression of parental-related genes in the POA versus retention of juvenile (neotenic) gene expression. While we did not find evidence for large scale gene downregulation, expression patterns did reflect substantial evidence for neotenic POA gene expression in parasitic birds. Differentially expressed genes with previously established roles in parental care were identified. Targeted examination of these selected candidate genes in additional hypothalamic regions revealed species differences in gene expression patterns is not POA-specific. Together, these results provide new insights into neurogenomics underlying maternal behavior loss in avian brood parasites.

scholarly journals Egg retrieval versus egg rejection in cuckoo hosts

2019 ◽  
Vol 374 (1769) ◽  
pp. 20180200 ◽  
Author(s):  
Canchao Yang ◽  
Wei Liang ◽  
Anders P. Møller
Keyword(s):  
Brood Parasitism ◽  
Visual Cues ◽  
Egg Rejection ◽  
Egg Recognition ◽  
Theme Issue ◽  
Brood Parasites ◽  
Cavity Nesting ◽  
Series Of Experiments ◽  
Avian Brood Parasitism ◽  
Different Levels

Before complex nests evolved, birds laid eggs on the ground, and egg retrieval evolved as an adaptation against accidental displacement of eggs outside the nest. Therefore, egg retrieval is an ancient, and likely ancestral, widespread behaviour in birds. However, it has received little attention in studies of avian brood parasitism, perhaps because most parasitism occurs in species with complex nests, a context in which egg retrieval seems irrelevant. However, for cavity-nesting hosts of avian brood parasites, egg retrieval may still play an important role in the coevolutionary interactions between obligate brood parasites and hosts, because egg retrieval can be considered to be antagonistic to egg rejection behaviour in hosts, yet both may involve cognition to recognize eggs. We hypothesized that (1) cavity-nesting hosts should retrieve misplaced eggs from outside the nest cup, (2) brood parasitism has modulated egg retrieval behaviour in cavity-nesting hosts and (3) hosts use the same visual cues for decision-making during egg recognition in both egg retrieval and egg rejection actions. To test these hypotheses, we performed a series of experiments in a cavity-nesting host, the green-backed tit (Parus monticolus). Foreign eggs with different levels of mimicry were placed within or outside nest cups of hosts to test their responses. We found that host decisions about whether to retrieve or reject an egg both depended on the degree of mimicry. However, hosts sometimes first retrieved poorly mimetic foreign eggs and then rejected them. Alternatively, hosts sometimes failed to retrieve highly mimetic conspecific eggs. We suggest that egg retrieval in hosts is likely to be a result of the interaction between ancient retrieval behaviour and subsequent adaptation against brood parasitism.This article is part of the theme issue ‘The coevolutionary biology of brood parasitism: from mechanism to pattern’.

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