Active hiding of social information from information-parasites
Downloads:
Loukola, O., Laaksonen, T., Seppänen, J.-T., & Forsman, J. (2014). Active hiding of social information from information-parasites. BMC Evolutionary Biology, 14 (32). doi:10.1186/1471-2148-14-32 Retrieved from http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2148/14/32
Published in
BMC Evolutionary BiologyDate
2014Discipline
Ekologia ja evoluutiobiologiaCopyright
© 2014 Loukola et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
Background:
Coevolution between pairs of different kind of entities, such as providers and users of information,
involves reciprocal selection pressures between them as a consequence of their ecological interaction. Pied
flycatchers (
Ficedula hypoleuca
) have been shown to derive fitness benefits (larger clutches) when nesting in
proximity to great tits (
Parus major
), presumably because they this way discover and obtain information about nesting
sites. Tits suffer from the resulting association (smaller clutches). An arms race between the tits (information host) and
the flycatchers (information parasite) could thus result
. Great tits often cover eggs with nesting material before,
but not during incubation. We hypothesized that one function of egg-covering could be a counter-adaptation to
reduce information parasitism by pied flycatchers. We predicted that tits should bring more new hair to cover their
exposed eggs when a pied flycatcher is present near to tit nest than when a neutral (non-competing) species is
present. We conducted decoy and playback experiment in Oulu and Turku, Finland. First, we removed and collected all
the hair covering the tit eggs. Then, we measured how the perceived presence of flycatcher or waxwing (
Bombycilla
garrulus
) affects tits' egg-covering by collecting and weighing the hair brought on the eggs and photographing the
nest 24 h after the playback.
Results:
Tits brought more hair into the nest and covered the eggs more carefully after flycatcher treatment,
compared to waxwing treatment. We also found that the tits in Oulu (over 600 km to north from Turku) had more hair
on the top of their eggs in general.
Conclusions:
Together, these results suggest that the counter-adaptation function of egg-covering against information
parasites may be an extension of original function to protect eggs from low temperatures.
...


Publisher
BioMed Central Ltd.ISSN Search the Publication Forum
1471-2148
Original source
http://www.biomedcentral.com/bmcevolbiol/Metadata
Show full item recordCollections
License
Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as © 2014 Loukola et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.