Probing the Limits of Egg Recognition Using Egg Rejection Experiments Along Phenotypic Gradients

Summary

This protocol provides guidelines for running egg rejection experiments: outlining techniques for painting experimental egg models to emulate the colors of natural bird eggs, conducting fieldwork, and analyzing the collected data. This protocol provides a uniform method for conducting comparable egg rejection experiments.

Abstract

Brood parasites lay their eggs in other females' nests, leaving the host parents to hatch and rear their young. Studying how brood parasites manipulate hosts into raising their young and how hosts detect parasitism provide important insights in the field of coevolutionary biology. Brood parasites, such as cuckoos and cowbirds, gain an evolutionary advantage because they do not have to pay the costs of rearing their own young. However, these costs select for host defenses against all developmental stages of parasites, including eggs, their young, and adults. Egg rejection experiments are the most common method used to study host defenses. During these experiments, a researcher places an experimental egg in a host nest and monitors how hosts respond. Color is often manipulated, and the expectation is that the likelihood of egg discrimination and the degree of dissimilarity between the host and experimental egg are positively related. This paper serves as a guide for conducting egg rejection experiments from describing methods for creating consistent egg colors to analyzing the findings of such experiments. Special attention is given to a new method involving uniquely colored eggs along color gradients that has the potential to explore color biases in host recognition. Without standardization, it is not possible to compare findings between studies in a meaningful way; a standard protocol within this field will allow for increasingly accurate and comparable results for further experiments.

Introduction

Brood parasites lay their eggs in the nests of other species that may then raise their young and pay the costs associated with parental care^1,2,3. This act of deception to outwit the host on the part of the parasite and sleuthing to detect the parasite on the part of the host provides strong selective pressures on both actors. In some cases of avian brood parasitism, the host's recognition of disparate parasitic eggs selects for parasites that mimic host eggs, which produces an evolutionary arms race between host and parasite⁴. Studying brood paras....

Protocol

All methods described here have been approved by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) of Long Island University-Post.

1. Mixing Acrylic Paints

1. Mix the eggshell ground coloration, which is the color that will uniformly cover the entire eggshell surface. The following recipe will make 50 g of paint, which will fill a little more than two 22 mL aluminum paint tubes.
   1. Generate a blue-green color, representing a blue-green eggshell (e.g., an American Robin T. migratorius eggshell), using 18.24 g of cobalt turquoise Light, 20.77 g of titanium white 6.52 g of cobalt green, and 2.86 g of c....

Results

Generating colorful egg models

Reflectance spectra of custom paint mixtures and natural eggs are shown in Figure 1A-1D. Paint mixtures used in brood parasitism studies should closely correspond with natural reflectance measurements in terms of spectral shape (color) and magnitude (brightness). If that is achieved, the color of the experimental egg should be perceive.......

Discussion

Although egg rejection experiments are the most common method to study brood parasite-host coevolution⁷⁰, concerted efforts to standardize materials, techniques, or protocols are lacking. This is especially problematic for meta-analyses. No meta-analysis, to our knowledge, of host egg rejection so far has controlled for methodological discrepancies among studies^71,72, including what is considered mimetic or non-mimetic. This represents a m.......

Materials

List of materials used in this article

Name	Company	Catalog Number	Comments
Replicator Mini +	Makerbot
Professional Acrylic Paint Cobalt Turquoise Light	Winsor & Newton	28382
Professional Acrylic Paint Titanium White	Winsor & Newton	28489
Professional Acrylic Paint Cobalt Green	Winsor & Newton	28381
Professional Acrylic Paint Cobalt Turquoise	Winsor & Newton	28449
Professional Acrylic Paint Burnt Umber	Winsor & Newton	28433
Professional Acrylic Paint Red Iron Oxide	Winsor & Newton	28486
Professional Acrylic Paint Cadmium Orange	Winsor & Newton	28437
Professional Acrylic Paint Raw Umber Light	Winsor & Newton	28391
Professional Acrylic Paint Yellow Ochre	Winsor & Newton	28491
Professional Acrylic Paint Mars Black	Winsor & Newton	28460
Paint Brush	Utrecht	206-FB	Filbert brush
Paint Brush	Utrecht	206-F	Flat brush
Hair Dryer	Oster	202
Fiber optic cables	Ocean Optics Inc.	OCF-103813	1 m custom bifurcating fiber optic assembly with blue zip tube (PVDF), 3.8mm nominal OD jeacketing and 2 legs
Spectrometer	Ocean Optics Inc.	Jaz	Spectrometer unit with a 50 um slit width, installed with a 200-850 nm detector (DET2B-200-850), and grating option # 2.
Battery and SD card module for spectrometer	Ocean Optics Inc.	Jaz-B
Light source	Ocean Optics Inc.	Jaz-PX	A pulsed xenon light source
White standard	Ocean Optics Inc.	WS-1-SL	made from Spectralon
OHAUS Adventurer Pro Scale	OHAUS	AV114C	A precision microbalance
Gemini-20 portable scale	AWS	Gemini-20	A standard scale
Empty Aluminum Paint Tubes (22 ml)	Creative Mark	NA
Telescopic mirror	SE	8014TM
GPS	Garmin	Oregon 600
220-grit sandpaper	3M	21220-SBP-15	very fine sandpaper
400-grit sandpaper	3M	20400-SBP-5	very fine sandpaper
color analysis software: ‘pavo’, an R package	for use in, R: A language and environment for statistical computing	v 1.3.1	https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/pavo/index.html
UV clear transparent	Flock off!	UV-001	A transparent ultraviolet paint
Plastic sandwich bags	Ziploc		Regular plastic sandwich bags from Ziploc that can be purchased at the supermarket.
Kimwipes	Kimberly-Clark Professional	34120	11 x 21 cm kimwipes
Toothbrush	Colgate		Toothbrush