Anti-brood Parasite Defences: The Role of Individual and Social Learning

Abstract

In this chapter, we consider the ways in which learning is involved in the anti-brood parasitism defences that hosts deploy across the nesting cycle. Brood parasitism varies in space and through time, and hosts have accordingly evolved plastic defences that can be tuned to local conditions. Hosts can achieve their defence plasticity by individual and social learning, as well as by experience-independent mechanisms. While these mechanisms can profoundly affect the coevolutionary dynamics between hosts and their brood parasites, our understanding of how they feature across the host nesting cycle is far from complete. Hosts can actively defend themselves against brood parasitism via a variety of behaviours, including nest defence, egg discrimination and chick discrimination. Such anti-brood parasite defences rely on the host’s ability to recognise and then defend against the parasitic threat, and there is good evidence that both these components of discrimination can be influenced by learning. To date, most research has focused on the function of learning in nest defence, but the learning mechanisms underlying egg discrimination are much better understood; and despite some notable exceptions, the role of learning in chick discrimination remains largely unexplored. An important challenge now is to understand the observed plasticity of anti-brood parasite defences in the context of environmental heterogeneity and specifically in terms of variation in the presence, detection and reliability of parasitism cues.