Phenological responses to climate change vary among taxa and across trophic levels. This can lead to a mismatch between the life cycles of ecologically interrelated populations (e.g. predators and prey), with negative consequences for population dynamics of some of the interacting species. Here we provide, to our knowledge, the first evidence that climate change might disrupt the association be...

Today’s world sees a lot of changes being done. These are a result of some modification or some innovation. This research is being done in the field of Swarm Intelligence or SI. It deals with studying the behaviour of organisms or swarms. Swarms are individual entities which are working on their own, yet their combined or aggregate behaviour yields some great results. This begins by studying th...

Sex allocation theory and empirical evidence both suggest that natural selection should favour maternal control of offspring sex ratio in relation to their ability to invest in the offspring. Generalist parasites constitute a particularly interesting group to test this theory as different females commonly utilize different host species showing large variation in provisioning ability. The common...

Recently, Brooker and Brooker suggested an equilibrium in the level of host defense and parasite counter-defense despite the passage of sufficient time for the evolution of host defenses through coevolution between brood parasites and their hosts. A long coevolutionary history of brood parasitism and nest predation has favored an adjustment of the host’s life-history pattern to the point where ...

Individuals often vary defences in response to local predation or parasitism risk. But how should they assess threat levels when it pays their enemies to hide? For common cuckoo hosts, assessing parasitism risk is challenging: cuckoo eggs are mimetic and adult cuckoos are secretive and resemble hawks. Here, we show that egg rejection by reed warblers depends on combining personal and social inf...

BACKGROUND Chicks of virulent brood parasitic birds eliminate their nestmates and avoid costly competition for foster parental care. Yet, efforts to evict nest contents by the blind and naked common cuckoo Cuculus canorus hatchling are counterintuitive as both adult parasites and large older cuckoo chicks appear to be better suited to tossing the eggs and young of the foster parents. METHODOL...

Because of computational drawbacks of conventional numerical methods in solving complex optimization problems, researchers may have to rely on meta-heuristic algorithms. Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is one of the most widely used algorithms due to its simplicity of implementation and fast convergence speed. Also, the cuckoo search algorithm is a recently developed meta-heuristic optimizati...

Coevolutionary arms races are a potent force in evolution, and brood parasite-host dynamics provide classical examples. Different host-races of the common cuckoo, Cuculus canorus, lay eggs in the nests of other species, leaving all parental care to hosts. Cuckoo eggs often (but not always) appear to match remarkably the color and pattern of host eggs, thus reducing detection by hosts. However, ...

Specialization makes resource use more efficient and should therefore be a common process in animal evolution. However, this process is not as universal in nature as one might expect. Our study shows that Sphecodes (Halictidae) cuckoo bees frequently change their host over the course of their evolution. To test the evolutionary scenario of host specialization in cuckoo bees, we constructed well...

The World Wide Web serves as a huge widely distributed global information service center. The tremendous amount of information on the web is improving day by day. So, the process of finding the relevant information on the web is a major challenge in Information Retrieval. This leads the need for the development of new techniques for helping users to effectively navigate, summarize and organize ...