Petrie Marion, Pinxten Rianne, Eens Marcel
Evolutionary Biology Group, Newcastle University, 4th Floor William Leach Building, Framlington Place, Newcastle-upon-Tyne NEI 4HH, UK.
Naturwissenschaften. 2009 Mar;96(3):405-7. doi: 10.1007/s00114-008-0486-5. Epub 2008 Dec 10.
How do birds recognize their own eggs? Do they have a stored template for their own egg characteristics, or do they use another mechanism? Intraspecific brood parasitism is considered to be an additional reproductive tactic where females can increase their own reproductive success. Because of the costs involved in rearing young that are not their own, it will pay females to detect and reject the eggs of a parasite, although it is not known how they do this. Here, we show experimentally that moorhens will cease laying in a nest when their first egg is replaced with another hen's egg but not when it is replaced with their own egg taken from an earlier clutch. This provides good evidence that birds have an internal representation of their own eggs and use this in decisions about whether to reject foreign eggs.
鸟类是如何识别自己的蛋的？它们是否有一个关于自身蛋特征的存储模板，还是使用其他机制？种内巢寄生被认为是一种额外的繁殖策略，雌性可以通过这种方式提高自己的繁殖成功率。由于养育非亲生幼雏会有成本，因此雌性发现并拒绝寄生者的蛋是有利的，尽管目前尚不清楚它们是如何做到这一点的。在这里，我们通过实验表明，当黑水鸡的第一枚蛋被另一枚母鸡的蛋替换时，它们会停止在该巢中产蛋，但当被替换的是从早期一窝蛋中取出的自己的蛋时，它们不会停止产蛋。这提供了有力证据，证明鸟类对自己的蛋有内在表征，并利用这一表征来决定是否拒绝外来的蛋。
