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Combining personal with social information facilitates host defences and explains why cuckoos should be secretive

Individuals often vary defences in response to local predation or parasitism risk. But how should they assess threat levels when it pays their enemies to hide? For common cuckoo hosts, assessing parasitism risk is challenging: cuckoo eggs are mimetic and adult cuckoos are secretive and resemble hawk...

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Autores principales: Thorogood, Rose, Davies, Nicholas B.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group 2016
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4726410/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26794435
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep19872
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author Thorogood, Rose
Davies, Nicholas B.
author_facet Thorogood, Rose
Davies, Nicholas B.
author_sort Thorogood, Rose
collection PubMed
description Individuals often vary defences in response to local predation or parasitism risk. But how should they assess threat levels when it pays their enemies to hide? For common cuckoo hosts, assessing parasitism risk is challenging: cuckoo eggs are mimetic and adult cuckoos are secretive and resemble hawks. Here, we show that egg rejection by reed warblers depends on combining personal and social information of local risk. We presented model cuckoos or controls at a pair’s own nest (personal information of an intruder) and/or on a neighbouring territory, to which they were attracted by broadcasts of alarm calls (social information). Rejection of an experimental egg was stimulated only when hosts were alerted by both social and personal information of cuckoos. However, pairs that rejected eggs were not more likely to mob a cuckoo. Therefore, while hosts can assess risk from the sight of a cuckoo, a cuckoo cannot gauge if her egg will be accepted from host mobbing. Our results reveal how hosts respond rapidly to local variation in parasitism, and why it pays cuckoos to be secretive, both to avoid alerting their targets and to limit the spread of social information in the local host neighbourhood.
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spelling pubmed-47264102016-01-27 Combining personal with social information facilitates host defences and explains why cuckoos should be secretive Thorogood, Rose Davies, Nicholas B. Sci Rep Article Individuals often vary defences in response to local predation or parasitism risk. But how should they assess threat levels when it pays their enemies to hide? For common cuckoo hosts, assessing parasitism risk is challenging: cuckoo eggs are mimetic and adult cuckoos are secretive and resemble hawks. Here, we show that egg rejection by reed warblers depends on combining personal and social information of local risk. We presented model cuckoos or controls at a pair’s own nest (personal information of an intruder) and/or on a neighbouring territory, to which they were attracted by broadcasts of alarm calls (social information). Rejection of an experimental egg was stimulated only when hosts were alerted by both social and personal information of cuckoos. However, pairs that rejected eggs were not more likely to mob a cuckoo. Therefore, while hosts can assess risk from the sight of a cuckoo, a cuckoo cannot gauge if her egg will be accepted from host mobbing. Our results reveal how hosts respond rapidly to local variation in parasitism, and why it pays cuckoos to be secretive, both to avoid alerting their targets and to limit the spread of social information in the local host neighbourhood. Nature Publishing Group 2016-01-22 /pmc/articles/PMC4726410/ /pubmed/26794435 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep19872 Text en Copyright © 2016, Macmillan Publishers Limited http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
spellingShingle Article
Thorogood, Rose
Davies, Nicholas B.
Combining personal with social information facilitates host defences and explains why cuckoos should be secretive
title Combining personal with social information facilitates host defences and explains why cuckoos should be secretive
title_full Combining personal with social information facilitates host defences and explains why cuckoos should be secretive
title_fullStr Combining personal with social information facilitates host defences and explains why cuckoos should be secretive
title_full_unstemmed Combining personal with social information facilitates host defences and explains why cuckoos should be secretive
title_short Combining personal with social information facilitates host defences and explains why cuckoos should be secretive
title_sort combining personal with social information facilitates host defences and explains why cuckoos should be secretive
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4726410/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26794435
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep19872
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