A magpie's guide to avoiding cuckoo parasitism
Some birds use a different breeding strategy to others to avoid cuckoos infiltrating their nests, say scientists.
Ecology
Mar 14, 2013
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Page 4 - News tagged with parasite eggs
Birds' eye size offers clues to coevolutionary arms race between brood parasites, hosts
Eye size likely plays a role in the contest between avian brood parasites—birds that lay their eggs in the nests of other species—and their hosts, who sometimes detect the foreign eggs and eject or abandon them, scientists ...
Plants & Animals
Sep 28, 2021
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Cuckoos hide from each other using 'cryptic' eggs
Cuckoos aren't the kind of parents you'd want. They never raise their young ones, leaving that job to other birds. They achieve this by laying their eggs in other expectant birds' nests, who treat them as their own and take ...
Plants & Animals
Aug 13, 2014
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Entomologists propose pesticide-free method to increase egg production
With the Easter holiday season coming up soon, egg consumption is expected to rise temporarily. But are hens in egg farms producing the maximum number of eggs they can?
Plants & Animals
Apr 8, 2011
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Eggs without yolk can hatch too
Most animals reproduce by laying eggs. As the embryo develops, its feeds on the egg yolk. No egg yolk, no offspring, then? Not always. Biologists from KU Leuven, Belgium, have discovered an exception to the rule: the eggs ...
Plants & Animals
Nov 12, 2015
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Parasitic wasps remember better if reward is greater
Two parasitic wasp species show similar memory consolidation patterns in response to rewards of different quality, providing evidence that the reward value affects the type of memory that is consolidated. The full results ...
Plants & Animals
Aug 22, 2012
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One to ovoid? Using 3-D printing, researchers can study what causes birds to reject eggs with greater precision
Old-school field work meets cutting-edge technology! For decades, researchers have been making artificial eggs out of plaster, wood, and other materials to test how birds identify and reject the eggs that invading "brood ...
Plants & Animals
May 26, 2015
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Scientists find 240 million-year-old parasite that infected mammals' ancestor
An egg much smaller than a common grain of sand and found in a tiny piece of fossilized dung has helped scientists identify a pinworm that lived 240 million years ago.
Plants & Animals
Dec 1, 2014
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New research finds cuckoos change their egg sizes according to their host
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 7, 2018
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Fungus application thwarts major soybean pest, study finds
The soybean cyst nematode sucks the nutrients out of soybean roots, causing more than $1 billion in soybean yield losses in the U.S. each year. A new study finds that one type of fungi can cut the nematodes' reproductive ...
Plants & Animals
Apr 9, 2020
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