Abstract
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.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Candy Rowe and Sue Healy for their comments on an earlier draft and to the EU for financial support. This work was part of a EU Human capital and mobility network on Brood parasitism awarded to M. Soler, A.P. Møller, C ten Cate, E. Røskaft, and M. Petrie. We thank the staff and zookeepers from the zoological garden of Planckendael for their assistance.
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Petrie, M., Pinxten, R. & Eens, M. Moorhens have an internal representation of their own eggs. Naturwissenschaften 96, 405–407 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00114-008-0486-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00114-008-0486-5