The common cuckoo (Cuculus canorus) is an avian brood parasite, laying its eggs in the nests of other bird species, where these hosts incubate the parasitic eggs, feed and rear the nestlings. The appearance of a cuckoo egg in a host nest may change the bacterial community in the nest. This may have consequences on the hatchability of host eggs, even when hosts reject the parasitic egg, typicall...

Co-evolutionary arms races have provided clear evidence for evolutionary change, especially in host-parasite systems. The evolution of host-specific races in the common cuckoo (Cuculus canorus), however, is also an example where sexual conflict influences the outcome. Cuckoo females benefit from better adaptation to overcome host defences, whereas cuckoo males face a trade-off between the benef...

Nature-inspiredmetaheuristic algorithms have become powerful and popular in computational intelligence and many applications. There are some important developments in recent years, and this special issue aims to provide a timely review of such developments, including ant colony optimization, bat algorithm, cuckoo search, particle swarm optimization, genetic algorithms, support vector machine, n...

Natural selection penalizes individuals that provide costly parental care to non-relatives. However, feedings to brood-parasitic fledglings by individuals other than their foster parents, although anecdotic, have been commonly observed, also in the great spotted cuckoo (Clamator glandarius)--magpie (Pica pica) system, but this behaviour has never been studied in depth. In a first experiment, we...