For two million years African cuckoo finches have been tricking other birds into raising their young by mimicking the colour of their eggs, but new research suggests the tables may be turning in this evolutionary scam.
Plants & Animals
Apr 16, 2022
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As many humans prepare to unwrap their Easter eggs, scientists have solved one of nature's biggest criminal cases, an egg forgery scandal two million years in the making. Their findings suggest that the victims of this fraud ...
Plants & Animals
Apr 11, 2022
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160
An international team of researchers has found that some parasitic bird embryos move around more in their eggs than other species, which makes them stronger when they hatch. In their paper published in Proceedings of the ...
Cuckoo wasps—also called emerald wasps—are some of the most beautiful insects we have, with colorful exteriors that shine like jewels. However, these beauties have also created a lot of headaches.
Plants & Animals
Apr 06, 2021
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One can seldom spot a cuckoo bee, whose peculiar kleptoparasitic behaviour includes laying eggs in the nests of a certain host bee species, let alone a couple mating.
Plants & Animals
Aug 27, 2018
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An international study into the sizes of oriental cuckoo eggs compared with the egg sizes of their four corresponding hosts in Russia has shown, for the first time, that cuckoos vary the size of their eggs to match those ...
Plants & Animals
Aug 07, 2018
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There are other animals besides the cuckoo who smuggle their offspring into another animal's nest. The synodontis multipunctatus, which lives in Lake Tanganyika in Africa and is better known as the cuckoo catfish, is just ...
Ecology
May 10, 2018
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58
Cuckoo bees sneakily lay their eggs in the nests of other bee species, after which their newly hatched prodigies kill the host egg or larva, and then feed on the stored pollen. The host, a solitary bee, never knows anything ...
Ecology
May 08, 2018
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187
Common cuckoos and oriental cuckoos in eastern Russia appear to be expanding their breeding range into western Alaska, where songbirds are naive to the cuckoos' wily ways, researchers report. A new study suggests the North ...
Ecology
May 07, 2018
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The Macropis Cuckoo Bee is one of the rarest bees in North America, partly because of its specialized ecological associations. It is a nest parasite of oil-collecting bees of the genus Macropis which, in turn, are dependent ...
Ecology
Apr 16, 2018
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The cuckoos are a family, Cuculidae, of near passerine birds. The order Cuculiformes, in addition to the cuckoos, also includes the turacos (family Musophagidae, sometimes treated as a separate order, Musophagiformes). Some zoologists and taxonomists have also included the unique Hoatzin in the Cuculiformes, but its taxonomy remains in dispute. The cuckoo family, in addition to those species named as such, also includes the roadrunners, koels, malkohas, couas, coucals and anis. The coucals and anis are sometimes separated as distinct families, the Centropodidae and Crotophagidae respectively.
The cuckoos are generally medium sized slender birds. The majority are arboreal, with a sizeable minority that are terrestrial. The family has a cosmopolitan distribution, with the majority of species being tropical. The temperate species are migratory. The cuckoos feed on insects, insect larvae and a variety of other animals, as well as fruit. Many species are brood parasites, laying their eggs in the nests of other species, but the majority of species raise their own young.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA
