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

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 …