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      Hosts of avian brood parasites have evolved egg signatures with elevated information content

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          Abstract

          Hosts of brood-parasitic birds must distinguish their own eggs from parasitic mimics, or pay the cost of mistakenly raising a foreign chick. Egg discrimination is easier when different host females of the same species each lay visually distinctive eggs (egg ‘signatures’), which helps to foil mimicry by parasites. Here, we ask whether brood parasitism is associated with lower levels of correlation between different egg traits in hosts, making individual host signatures more distinctive and informative. We used entropy as an index of the potential information content encoded by nine aspects of colour, pattern and luminance of eggs of different species in two African bird families (Cisticolidae parasitized by cuckoo finches Anomalospiza imberbis, and Ploceidae by diederik cuckoos Chrysococcyx caprius). Parasitized species showed consistently higher entropy in egg traits than did related, unparasitized species. Decomposing entropy into two variation components revealed that this was mainly driven by parasitized species having lower levels of correlation between different egg traits, rather than higher overall levels of variation in each individual egg trait. This suggests that irrespective of the constraints that might operate on individual egg traits, hosts can further improve their defensive ‘signatures' by arranging suites of egg traits into unpredictable combinations.

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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Proc Biol Sci
                Proc. Biol. Sci
                RSPB
                royprsb
                Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
                The Royal Society
                0962-8452
                1471-2954
                7 July 2015
                7 July 2015
                : 282
                : 1810
                : 20150598
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge , Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3EJ, UK
                [2 ]Centre for Ecology and Conservation, College of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Exeter , Penryn Campus, Penryn, Cornwall TR10 9FE, UK
                [3 ]Department of Statistical Science, Duke University , PO Box 90251, Durham, NC 27708-0251, USA
                [4 ]DST-NRF Centre of Excellence at the Percy FitzPatrick Institute, University of Cape Town , Cape Town, Rondebosch 7701, South Africa
                Author notes
                Article
                rspb20150598
                10.1098/rspb.2015.0598
                4590476
                26085586
                58455aad-2a3e-4491-9a88-170526faabcc

                © 2015 The Authors. Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.

                History
                : 15 March 2015
                : 19 May 2015
                Categories
                1001
                70
                Research Articles
                Custom metadata
                July 7, 2015

                Life sciences
                avian vision,brood parasitism,coevolution,entropy,information theory,signals
                Life sciences
                avian vision, brood parasitism, coevolution, entropy, information theory, signals

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