Abstract
In species that are subject to brood parasitism, individuals often vary in their responses to parasitic eggs, with some rejecting the eggs while others do not. While some factors, such as host age (breeding experience), the degree of egg matching and the level of perceived risk of brood parasitism have been shown to influence host decisions, much of the variation remains unexplained. The host personality hypothesis suggests that personality traits of the host influence its response to parasitic eggs, but few studies have tested this. We investigated the relationship between two personality traits (exploration and neophobia) and a physiological trait (breathing rate) of the host, and egg-rejection behaviour in a population of Daurian redstarts Phoenicurus auroreus in northeast China. We first show that exploratory behaviour and the response to a novel object are repeatable for individual females and strongly covary, indicating distinct personality types. We then show that fast-exploring and less neophobic hosts were more likely to reject parasitic eggs than slow-exploring and more neophobic hosts. Variation in breathing rate—a measure of the stress-response—did not affect rejection behaviour. Our results demonstrate that host personality, along the bold-shy continuum, predicts the responses to parasitic eggs in Daurian redstarts, with bold hosts being more likely to reject parasitic eggs.
Highlights
Obligate avian brood parasites lay their eggs into the nests of other species and transfer the costs of parental care to their hosts [1]
We report on an experimental study to test the host personality hypothesis using the Daurian redstart Phoenicurus auroreus as a model species
This study shows that personality traits of a common host predict the host’s response to a brood parasitic egg
Summary
Obligate avian brood parasites lay their eggs into the nests of other species and transfer the costs of parental care to their hosts [1]. Empirical tests of a relationship between personality traits and egg-rejection behaviour in brood parasitized hosts remain scarce. In black-capped chickadees Poecile atricapillus, fast explorers learned acoustic cues more quickly [35], and similar results have been found in great tits Parus major and common starlings Sturnus vulgaris [36,37] These results lead to the prediction that fast explorers would be better at rejecting parasitic eggs. We previously found that egg-rejection behaviour in Daurian redstarts varied with host clutch colour and with the risk of parasitism: females laying pink eggs were more likely to reject foreign eggs than individuals laying blue eggs, and hosts experiencing a higher risk of being parasitized (cuckoo presence, see below) had higher egg-rejection rates [44]. We investigated how these traits influence the response of the host to a parasitic egg
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