Nahid Mominul Islam, Ranke Peter S, Liang Wei
Ministry of Education Key Laboratory for Ecology of Tropical Islands, Key Laboratory of Tropical Animal and Plant Ecology of Hainan Province, College of Life Sciences Hainan Normal University Haikou China.
Bangladesh Forest Research Institute (BFRI) Khulna Bangladesh.
Ecol Evol. 2024 Apr 29;14(5):e11345. doi: 10.1002/ece3.11345. eCollection 2024 May.
Avian brood parasites depend upon locating host nests to lay their eggs. However, how brood parasites locate host nests and select the nests for parasitism remains poorly studied. Here, we examined how a non-evicting brood parasite, the Asian koel () were able to locate host nests in locally novel nest sites. We provided a set of novel nest sites (i.e., nestboxes, = 100) to the common myna (), a regular host of the Asian koel, at a field site in Central Bangladesh. We found that common myna quickly utilized the novel breeding sites ( = 99 nests across 59 boxes) and similarly, 21.2% of these nests were parasitized by the Asian koel. Unsurprisingly, none of the inactive nest boxes were parasitized, neither were empty nests of common myna (i.e., either predated or fledged clutches, thus lack of parental activity, = 83). Our results provide an experimental demonstration of the Asian koel ability to rapidly locate nests in locally novel nest sites, potentially facilitated by close monitoring of host activity and behavior around the nest site. However, the underlying mechanisms for this rapid adjustment to novel nest sites remain unresolved.
鸟类巢寄生者依赖于找到宿主巢穴来产卵。然而，巢寄生者如何找到宿主巢穴并选择用于寄生的巢穴仍未得到充分研究。在这里，我们研究了一种不会驱逐宿主的巢寄生者——噪鹃（）是如何在当地新的巢穴地点找到宿主巢穴的。我们在孟加拉国中部的一个野外地点为亚洲椋鸟（）提供了一组新的巢穴地点（即巢箱，=100个），亚洲椋鸟是噪鹃的常见宿主。我们发现亚洲椋鸟很快利用了这些新的繁殖地点（59个巢箱中有=99个巢穴），同样，其中21.2%的巢穴被噪鹃寄生。不出所料，没有一个未使用的巢箱被寄生，亚洲椋鸟的空巢（即要么被捕食要么雏鸟已出飞，因此缺乏亲代活动，=83个）也没有被寄生。我们的结果提供了一个实验证明，表明噪鹃有能力在当地新的巢穴地点迅速找到巢穴，这可能是通过密切监测巢穴周围宿主的活动和行为来实现的。然而，这种对新巢穴地点的快速适应的潜在机制仍未得到解决。
