Does the host specific races of the common cuckoo evolve with the gene by the side of female lineages?

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The common cuckoo is divided into host-specific races (gentes). Females of each race lay a distinctive egg type that tends to match the host's eggs. It was provided genetic evidence that gentes restricted to female lineages from the fact that there is differentiation between gentes in maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA, but not in microsatellite loci of nuclear DNA. This supports recent behavioural evidence that female, but not male, common cuckoos specialize on a particular host, and is consistent with the possibility that genes affecting cuckoo egg type are located on the female-specific W sex chromosome. Our results in Japan also supported these ideas, but the host races are not so clear in Japan, due to colonization by separated ancestral lineages.