Departamento de Biología Animal y Ecología, Universidad de Granada, Granada, Spain.
J Evol Biol. 2010 Feb;23(2):293-301. doi: 10.1111/j.1420-9101.2009.01898.x. Epub 2009 Nov 26.
Hosts of cuckoos have evolved defences allowing them to discriminate and reject parasite eggs. Mechanisms of discrimination are mostly visually mediated, and have been studied using approaches that do not account for what the receiver (i.e. host) actually can discriminate. Here, for the first time we apply a perceptual model of colour discrimination to study behavioural responses to natural variation in parasite egg appearance in chaffinches Fringilla coelebs. Discrimination of parasite eggs gradually increased with increasing differences in chromatic contrasts as perceived by birds between parasite and host eggs. These results confirm that colour differences of the eggs as perceived by birds are important integral parts of a matching signal used by chaffinch hosts.
宿主杜鹃进化出了防御机制，可以识别和拒绝寄生虫卵。识别机制大多是通过视觉介导的，并且已经使用了一些方法进行了研究，这些方法没有考虑到接收者（即宿主）实际上可以识别什么。在这里，我们首次应用颜色辨别感知模型来研究雀形目鸟对寄生虫卵外观自然变异的行为反应。寄生虫卵和宿主卵之间的颜色对比差异越大，雀形目鸟对寄生虫卵的辨别能力就越强。这些结果证实，鸟类感知到的卵的颜色差异是雀形目宿主所使用的匹配信号的重要组成部分。
