Scientists have figured out what allows cuckoos to properly use egg camouflage in nest parasitism. Article about it published Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
With nest parasitism, birds do not spend energy to raise young, they lay their eggs in the nests of other species. This is how different cuckoos behave. However, in order for the nest owners not to notice someone else’s egg, it must be similar to their own egg. In this context, it is not entirely clear to scientists how the same cuckoo can parasitize different species with different eggs.
Claire Spottiswoode of the University of Cambridge and her colleagues have discovered how the offspring of a pair of cuckoos reared in different species have the right egg camouflage. The scientists analyzed the DNA of 196 weavers from 141 nests belonging to four different warbler species. It turns out that the genes responsible for the emergence of eggs are transmitted by the W chromosome, which is found only in females, just as in humans only males have a Y chromosome. Thus, since the shape of the eggs is inherited only from the mother: the female will inherit the shape of the eggs only from the mother, and the father, who has grown up with the other owners, will influence it. When the female matures, she lays her eggs in the nest of the species she grew up in.
However, “faking” eggs is not so simple. In a previous study, the authors found that some brown-faced monkeys have evolved to lay olive-green eggs, probably because cuckoos are unable to produce pigments to reproduce this color.
Source: Gazeta
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