Green eggs and scam: Cuckoo finch's long con may be up:
For two million years African cuckoo finches have been tricking other birds into raising their young by mimicking the colour of their eggs, but new research suggests the tables may be turning in this evolutionary scam.
The cute yellow appearance of the cuckoo finch belies its nefarious nature: it smuggles its forged eggs into foreign nests, where unwitting foster parents treat them like their very own.
The cuckoo finch eggs then hatch a little earlier than the others in the nest, allowing them to grow quicker and beg more loudly for food than the host chicks—which starve to death as their confused parents prioritise the imposter.
Aiming to save their young from this grisly fate, birds like the African tawny-flanked prinia, a common victim of the ruse, have evolved ever more colourful and elaborate patterns for their eggs to avoid falling for counterfeits.
But the wily cuckoo finch has responded in kind, evolving the ability to copy a variety of egg colours and signatures of several different bird species.
[...] Claire Spottiswoode, an evolutionary biologist of the University of Cambridge and University of Cape Town who led the research, gave the example of the olive-green egg, laid by the tawny-flanked prinia.
A single female cuckoo finch cannot produce an infinite variety of differently coloured eggs, she said.
It can only mimic the egg of the bird that raised it—the cuckoo finch is "imprinted" with how to target its future victims from the shells of its foster siblings.
This means that different cuckoo finches can lay blue or white eggs, while others can produce them in red and white—but because the skill is inherited via the female chromosome, they can never combine those pigments to make that olive green.
"Maternal inheritance is the reason why they're unable to mimic that particular deep olive green colour," Spottiswoode told AFP.
Journal Reference:
Claire N. Spottiswoode, et. al., Genetic architecture facilitates then constrains adaptation in a host–parasite coevolutionary arms race, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2022). (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2121752119)
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 19 2022, @07:20AM (2 children)
So there is a Spam mod, unjustified, but that remains because the admin and editorial staff wish it to. The Community is watching, If this illegitimate spam mod is not removed in the next 24 hours, well, there will be hell to pay. Some may say, it is obviously an aristarchus AC post! But the obvious rebuttal is, it is not? So the right thing to do is to rescind the Spam mod, let normal moderation take over, kill all the current editors, and restore MartyB, if he be ready.
https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=48726&commentsort=0&mode=threadtos&threshold=0&highlightthresh=-1&page=1&cid=1236687#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]
Abuse of the Spam mod. Prove me wrong.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 19 2022, @07:37AM (1 child)
I want to moderate this as off topic.
But this guy's completely cuckoo.
Which makes.on topic. We are talking about cuckoo's, no?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 19 2022, @08:19AM
Yes, exactly! So the question is, are the admins going to push this Spam egg out of the nest, or let it hatch as one of their own, just to stick it to the libs. Suck cucks bullocks beta fucks!@
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 19 2022, @11:07AM
Alice in Wonderland's Red Queen Race is often used to describe competing species' evolutionary changes racing against each other to try and stay ahead of the parasitic predator.
Just look at American Politics for more examples.