Īlthough much emphasis has been placed on understanding the mechanisms by which hosts recognise interspecific brood parasites, less effort has been directed towards understanding if and how parents recognise conspecific brood parasitism (CBP). However, birds are faced not only with interspecific brood parasites, such as cuckoos and cowbirds, but also with conspecific brood parasites, which Davies describes as “cheating on your own kind”. Interspecific brood parasitism is probably the most prominent and obvious example in which individuals of some species seem to have failed to exhibit a recognition mechanism. Accordingly, selection should have favoured mechanisms in adults to discriminate between own and foreign offspring. Because parental care is costly in terms of time and energy, it should be provided exclusively to descendent young. Raising offspring until independence is one of the major challenges in species with parental care. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. The authors acknowledge support for the Article Processing Charge by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the Open Access Publication Fund of Bielefeld University. įunding: This project was financially supported by the Volkswagen Foundation through a Freigeist Fellowship to BAC. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: All relevant data are available on Dryad at. Received: FebruAccepted: ApPublished: May 18, 2016Ĭopyright: © 2016 Golüke et al. PLoS ONE 11(5):Įditor: Csaba Moskát, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, HUNGARY The finding that females are capable to smell their own egg may inspire more research on the potential of olfaction involved in egg recognition, especially in cases where visual cues might be limited.Ĭitation: Golüke S, Dörrenberg S, Krause ET, Caspers BA (2016) Female Zebra Finches Smell Their Eggs. However, shortly before hatching, females preferred significantly the odour of their own egg. After the onset of incubation, females chose randomly and showed no sign of discrimination. In a binary choice experiment, female zebra finches were given the choice between the scent of their own and a conspecific egg. without any spotting pattern, and intraspecific brood parasitism frequently occurs. Zebra finches are colonial-breeding songbirds. Here, we investigated whether female zebra finches ( Taeniopygia guttata) are able to discriminate between their own and a conspecific egg based on olfactory cues alone. However, olfactory egg recognition has almost been completely ignored. In birds, much emphasis has been placed on understanding the visual mechanisms underlying egg recognition. Therefore selection should favour mechanisms to discriminate between own and foreign offspring. Parental investment in unrelated offspring seems maladaptive from an evolutionary perspective, due to the costs of energy and resources that cannot be invested in related offspring at the same time.
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