{"id":188176,"date":"2024-04-26T18:27:10","date_gmt":"2024-04-26T23:27:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/04\/evolutionary-biologists-show-that-the-color-variants-of-female-cuckoos-are-based-on-ancient-mutations"},"modified":"2024-04-26T18:27:10","modified_gmt":"2024-04-26T23:27:10","slug":"evolutionary-biologists-show-that-the-color-variants-of-female-cuckoos-are-based-on-ancient-mutations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/04\/evolutionary-biologists-show-that-the-color-variants-of-female-cuckoos-are-based-on-ancient-mutations","title":{"rendered":"Evolutionary biologists show that the color variants of female cuckoos are based on ancient mutations"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/evolutionary-biologists-show-that-the-color-variants-of-female-cuckoos-are-based-on-ancient-mutations.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Every cuckoo is an adopted child\u2014raised by foster parents, into whose nest the cuckoo mother smuggled her egg. The cuckoo mother is aided in this subterfuge by her resemblance to a bird of prey. There are two variants of female cuckoos: a gray morph that looks like a sparrowhawk, and a rufous morph. Male cuckoos are always gray.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWith this mimicry, the bird imitates dangerous predators of the <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/host\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">host<\/a> birds, so that they keep their distance instead of attacking,\u201d says Professor Jochen Wolf from LMU Munich.<\/p>\n<p>Together with researchers at CIBIO (Centro de Investiga\u00e7\u00e3o em Biodiversidade e Recursos Gen\u00e9ticos, Portugal), the evolutionary biologist has investigated the genetic foundations of the variant coloring, which is limited to females and emerged over the long evolutionary arms race between host and <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/cuckoo\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">cuckoo<\/a>. The research is <a href=\"https:\/\/www.science.org\/doi\/10.1126\/sciadv.adl5255\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in the journal Science Advances.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Every cuckoo is an adopted child\u2014raised by foster parents, into whose nest the cuckoo mother smuggled her egg. The cuckoo mother is aided in this subterfuge by her resemblance to a bird of prey. There are two variants of female cuckoos: a gray morph that looks like a sparrowhawk, and a rufous morph. Male cuckoos [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":661,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[412],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-188176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-genetics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/661"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=188176"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188176\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=188176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=188176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=188176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}