How many eggs should be laid in one's own nest and others’ in intra‐specific brood parasitism?

Abstract

AbstractRecent field studies have demonstrated that many bird species practice intra‐specific brood parasitism. They lay eggs in the nests of other individuals of the same species, let the foster parents rear their offspring and avoid the cost of parental care. It has been shown that many birds, including starlings, swallows and geese, practice intra‐specific brood parasitism in various forms. Intra‐specific brood parasitism can be viewed in terms of optimal resource allocation: how many eggs should be put in the nests of other individuals under the risk of being parasitized by others. The situation here is a “game”, because the fitness of a parasitic individual depends on how other individuals behave (how many individuals practice parasitism and to what extent). The ecology of intra‐specific brood parasitism has been investigated extensively by field ornithologists recently and it is full of material for modeling population/evolutionary biology. In this paper, I present a simple individual‐based model to challenge the resource allocation problem in intra‐specific brood parasitism. Previous theoretical studies of intra‐specific brood parasitism have been based on ESS or quantitative genetics models, where a population is implicitly assumed to be homogeneous and the distribution form of the trait being studied (the allocation rate or the number of eggs laid parasitically) is inherently monomorphic. This paper aims to explore the evolution of intra‐specific brood parasitism without these restrictions. In the model, an individual is assigned a strategy, an allocation ratio of eggs that are laid parasitically in the nests of other individuals, and the strategy is inherited by offspring either asexually or sexually. Based on the simulation analysis, the evolution of the allocation rate (the extent of intra‐specific brood parasitism) is discussed. The extension of this model to a tractable analytical model is also discussed.