Foster family protects duck eggs against birds of prey

Young cuckoo ducks do not need any care: they are independent upon hatching. Then why does the duck burden other birds with its eggs, Bruce Lyon and colleagues wondered.

In South America a duck species occurs that, like a cuckoo, lays its eggs in nests of other bird species. The hosts then unintentionally take care of them. This is the black-headed duck, Heteronetta atricapilla, with the appropriate nickname cuckoo duck; it is a so-called brood parasite.

Bruce Lyon and colleagues wondered why the cuckoo duck dumps its eggs in other birds’ nests. They don’t require much care, apart from brooding. After hatching, the young are immediately independent. That is a big difference with all other brood parasites, such as the common cuckoo. These species have young that have to be fed and protected for weeks, so it is very profitable for parents to outsource the care. But how does the cuckoo duck profit?

Easy prey

The shedding of parental duties may have to do with the danger of predation, Lyon hypothesized. If the cuckoo duck were to make its own nest, it would be close to water. And in such nest, eggs are easy prey for avian predators, especially the chimango caracara. This was shown in experiments in which the researchers placed chicken eggs in a self-made, unguarded nest. Within a few days, all eggs were gone.

Unless they placed the nest in a colony of brown-headed gulls. In that case, hardly any egg was stolen.

This gull is one of the hosts in whose nests the cuckoo duck dumps its eggs. In Argentina, where the study was conducted, two other important hosts occur, the red-fronted coot and the red-gartered coot. Like the brown-headed gull, they are aggressive birds that are capable to defend their nests fiercely. Is that the reason why the cuckoo duck chooses them to care for its offspring?

Safe

It seems to be. The duck eggs are indeed quite safe with these fierce foster parents, the researchers noted. Admittedly, it may happen that foster parents recognize a foreign egg and throw it out of the nest. But if they accept the egg, it almost always remains undisturbed and hatches. This very high chance of survival upon acceptance far outweighs the risk of rejection.

The researchers do not know exactly how much the cuckoo duck gains. They could not determine how many eggs would survive in a self-defended nest, because it never builds a nest. But related duck species that do incubate and guard their own eggs lose quite a lot to birds of prey.

Willy van Strien

Photo: black-headed duck couple. Cláudio Dias Timm (Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons BY-SA 2.0).

Source:
Lyon, B.E., A. Carminati, G. Goggin & J.M. Eadie, 2022. Did extreme nest predation favor the evolution of obligate brood parasitism in a duck? Ecology and Evolution 12: e9251. Doi: 10.1002/ece3.9251

Cuckoo catfish improves its timing

It is not easy for a cuckoo catfish to get its eggs adopted by intended host parents, because these are wary. But it learns the trick by experience, as Holger Zimmermann and colleagues show.

Cuckoo catfish dump their eggs at host parents to let them take care of their offspring: they are brood parasites. That seems easy and, in a way, it is, because the eggs can develop safely without the real parents having to worry. But they do have to bring them to the host parents, and that is not so easy. In that sense, cuckoo catfish spend more effort for their offspring than most fish, which simply lay eggs and leave them behind.

They have to practice the art of parasitism, Holger Zimmermann and colleagues write. The cuckoo catfish (Synodontis multipunctatus) is, as far as we know, the only fish species that, like a cuckoo, relegates the raising of its offspring to others. It lives in Lake Tanganyika in Africa.

Abuse

It takes advantage of species of cichlids that have the most extensive form of parental care, the so-called mouthbrooders. In these species, mothers take the fertilized eggs in the mouth and keep them there until they hatch, after a few weeks.

During spawning, such mouthbrooding cichlids circle around each other and release eggs and sperm; in between acts, they defend the spawning site against intruders.

But a group of cuckoo catfish may intrude. They consume some cichlid eggs before the mother has been able to collect them and drop a few eggs themselves and fertilize them. The cichlid mother panics and collects her eggs as fast as she can; in her haste, she also takes up catfish eggs.

The catfish must interfere at exactly the right time, when the female cichlid is busy laying eggs; it’s a matter of seconds. By experience, they learn to improve the timing of egg laying and fertilization, Zimmermann shows with experiments in tanks, in which he exposed cichlids (4 males and 12 females) to three cuckoo catfish pairs.

Sharper timing

The researchers searched for host parents that have no resistance against the underwater cuckoo. With resilient host parents, the learning process of the parasite would not show up. They selected the mouthbrooder Astatotilapia burtoni, which lives in Lake Tanganyika and is known to the catfish. But they took a population from a neighbouring river, where the cuckoo catfish does not occur. The chosen host parents have no innate defences against cuckoo catfish, nor do they learn to avoid it, but they do behave aggressively towards any fish that disturb the spawning to predate on eggs.

Unexperienced cuckoo catfish almost never managed to get their eggs taken up by these host parents. Only 3 percent of their attempts succeeded. But after some time – in the experiments after four months, about 30 attempts – things got much better: more than 25 percent of the attempts now was successful. That success rate did not increase further. Experienced catfish also managed to consume more eggs of the host parents in the brief time available.

The improvement was possible because the parasites learn to lay and fertilize their eggs at precisely the right time, as behavioural observations showed. In addition, groups of catfish improve the coordination of their intrusive act.

Host parent is loser

Most attempts fail, though, even in experienced cuckoo catfish, because the vigilant cichlids outsmart their enemy. But that does not matter, because the profits for the parasite are large if the action does succeed. A host mother then carries on average five parasite eggs. The catfish will hatch sooner than the cichlids, and the young catfish devour some cichlid embryos.

The host mother is the loser. She is abused and produces fewer young of her own.

Willy van Strien

Photo: Cuckoo catfish. Calwhiz. (Via Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Cichlids from Lake Tanganyika have learned to coexist with cuckoo catfish

Source:
Zimmermann, H., R. Blažek, M. Polačik & M. Reichard, 2022. Individual experience as a key to success for the cuckoo catfish brood parasitism. Nature Communications 13: 1723. Doi: 10.1038/s41467-022-29417-y