although host species generally face increased risk of brood parasitism in fragmented temperate landscapes and forest edge, little information exists to assess such risks in tropical birds. we studied how cuculidae species populations, host species population, and micro-environmental variables changed along an edge-to-interior gradient in peninsular malaysia. bird observations and environmental...

In avian brood parasitism, both the host and the parasite are expected to develop various conflicting adaptations; hosts develop a defense against parasitism, such as an ability to recognize and reject parasitic eggs that look unlike their own, while parasites evolve egg mimicry to counter this host defense. Hosts may further evolve to generate various egg phenotypes that are not mimicked by pa...

the cuckoo search algorithm is a recently developedmeta-heuristic optimization algorithm, which is suitable forsolving optimization problems. to enhance the accuracy andconvergence rate of this algorithm, an improved cuckoo searchalgorithm is proposed in this paper. normally, the parametersof the cuckoo search are kept constant. this may lead todecreasing the efficiency of the algorithm. to cop...

Some parasite cuckoo species lay eggs that, to the human eye, appear to mimic the appearance of the eggs of their favourite hosts, which hinders discrimination and removal of their eggs by host species. Hitherto, perception of cuckoo-host egg mimicry has been estimated based on human vision or spectrophotometry, which does not account for what the receivers' eye (i.e. hosts) actually discrimina...

Cuckoo hosts defend themselves against parasitism by means of mobbing, egg rejection, and chick rejection. However, each of these defenses is prone to costly recognition errors, and hosts are therefore more likely to deploy these defenses if they observe a cuckoo in the vicinity of their nest. The success of such response plasticity depends on accurate recognition of sympatric cuckoo species, b...

The common cuckoo, Cuculus canorus, is a brood parasite that monopolizes parental care of its host species: soon after hatching, the chicks remove the host offspring. Although cuckoo chicks trick their foster parents into providing enough food, it is unknown whether cuckoo begging behaviour represents an advantage over that of the host chicks in a hypothetical competitive scenario. We studied t...

Cuckoo-host interactions provide classical examples of coevolution. Cuckoos place hosts under selection to detect and reject foreign eggs, while host defences result in the evolution of host-egg mimicry in cuckoos. Despite a long history of research, egg pattern mimicry has never been objectively quantified, and so its coevolution with host defences has not been properly assessed. Here, we use ...

The cuckoo search algorithm is a recently developedmeta-heuristic optimization algorithm, which is suitable forsolving optimization problems. To enhance the accuracy andconvergence rate of this algorithm, an improved cuckoo searchalgorithm is proposed in this paper. Normally, the parametersof the cuckoo search are kept constant. This may lead todecreasing the efficiency of the algorithm. To cop...

This paper is centered around the design of a threadand memory-safe language, primarily for the compilation of application-specific services for extensible operating systems. We describe various issues that have influenced the design of our language, called Cuckoo, that guarantees safety of programs with potentially asynchronous flows of control. Comparisons are drawn between Cuckoo and related...