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Choosing suitable hosts: common cuckoos Cuculus canorus parasitize great reed warblers Acrocephalus arundinaceus of high quality
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SYSNO ASEP 0311392 Document Type J - Journal Article R&D Document Type Journal Article Subsidiary J Článek ve WOS Title Choosing suitable hosts: common cuckoos Cuculus canorus parasitize great reed warblers Acrocephalus arundinaceus of high quality Title Výběr vhodných hostitelů: kukačky obecné Cuculus canorus parazitují kvalitní rákosníky velké Acrocephalus arundinaceus Author(s) Polačiková, Lenka (UBO-W) RID, SAI
Procházka, Petr (UBO-W) RID, ORCID, SAI
Cherry, M. I. (ZA)
Honza, Marcel (UBO-W) RID, SAI, ORCIDSource Title Evolutionary Ecology. - : Springer - ISSN 0269-7653
Roč. 23, č. 6 (2009), s. 879-891Number of pages 13 s. Language eng - English Country NL - Netherlands Keywords Brood parasitism ; Cuckoo ; Host quality ; Host selection ; Spectrophotometry Subject RIV EH - Ecology, Behaviour R&D Projects GD524/05/H536 GA ČR - Czech Science Foundation (CSF) IAA600930605 GA AV ČR - Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic (AV ČR) LC06073 GA MŠMT - Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports (MEYS) CEZ AV0Z60930519 - UBO-W (2005-2011) UT WOS 000271949700004 EID SCOPUS 70450149872 DOI 10.1007/s10682-008-9278-9 Annotation We investigated the hypothesis that the common cuckoo selects host pairs of good phenotypic quality. As cuckoos may select hosts within a population non-randomly based on external cues reflecting their foster abilities, we predicted that great reed warbler pairs parasitized by the cuckoo would exhibit higher quality than unparasitized ones. We evaluated two different parameters indicating host quality: body condition and characteristics of host eggs. We found that parasitized females showed significantly better body condition. Moreover, the likelihood of being parasitized increased with decreasing colour variability within clutches: parasitized females allocated costly blue pigments to eggshells more equally compared with unparasitized ones. In highly mimetic systems, cuckoos may choose to parasitize hosts with eggs displaying low intraclutch variation, both because this leads to reduced rejection and because these hosts are of high quality. Workplace Institute of Vertebrate Biology Contact Hana Slabáková, slabakova@ivb.cz, Tel.: 543 422 524 Year of Publishing 2010
Number of the records: 1