两种共域山鹪莺对杜鹃巢寄生的反寄生策略

鸟类巢寄生作为一种特殊的繁殖行为，寄生者通过让其它个体为其抚养后代而致使寄主蒙受巨大代价，许多寄主为此进化出识别并拒绝寄生卵或雏鸟等反寄生对策来提高适合度，两者之间的相互作用过程是研究协同进化的一个模式系统。本研究通过对黄腹山鹪莺（Prinia flaviventris）和纯色山鹪莺（P. inornata）在中国大陆的多杜鹃寄生系统和台湾的中杜鹃（Cuculus optatus）单一寄生系统的比较，从对寄生杜鹃的巢防御、卵识别能力、识别线索和识别机制、窝卵数变异及其繁殖生活史特征等方面揭示两种山鹪莺的反寄生策略及其进化适应性，以丰富和深化人们对于鸟类巢寄生中寄生者与寄主之间在不同寄生选择压力下的协同进化的理解。

Avian brood parasitism as a specific breeding strategy, the parasite generally transfers the rearing obligation to their hosts which would suffer enormous costs from egg incubation and nestling rearing. These hosts will evolve an adaptation to increase their fitness, according to egg discrimination and rejection of the foreign parasitic egg to defense against brood parasitism. Hence, the reciprocal interaction is a good model system for coevolution research. The proposed study will compare anti-parasitism strategies to cuckoo parasitism in two sympatric prinia hosts, the yellow bellied prinia Prinia flaviventris and plain prinia P. inornata, under the single-cuckoo parasitism system in Taiwan Island with that of the multiple-cuckoo parasitism system in mainland China. Such anti-parasitism adaptations include nest defense, egg recognition ability, egg cognitive mechanism and recognition cues, variation of clutch size and life history traits. These investigations would significantly improve our knowledge of adaptation and counter-adaptation in the arms race between parasites and their hosts under different selection pressure.