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Behavioral Ecology Advance Access originally published online on June 6, 2006
Behavioral Ecology 2006 17(5):700-708; doi:10.1093/beheco/ark019
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© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Importance of spatial habitat structure on establishment of host defenses against brood parasitism

Eivin Røskafta, Fugo Takasub, Arne Moksnesa and Bård Gunnar Stokkea

a Department of Biology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Realfagbygget, N-7491 Trondheim, Norway and b Department of Information and Computer Sciences, Nara Women's University, Kita-Uoya Nishimachi, Nara 630-8506, Japan

Address correspondence to E. Røskaft. E-mail: eivin.roskaft{at}bio.ntnu.no.

We used metapopulation dynamics to develop a mathematical simulation model for brood parasites and their hosts in order to investigate the validity of the "spatial habitat structure hypothesis," which states that a low level of parasite egg rejection in host populations is due to the immigration of acceptor individuals from nonparasitized populations. In our model, we varied dispersal rate and the relative carrying capacity of host individuals in parasitized and unparasitized patches. When both the relative carrying capacity in the parasite-free patch and the dispersal rate increase, the nonparasitized patch will provide more acceptor individuals to the parasite-prone patch. As the relative carrying capacity in the parasite-free patch increases, the equilibrium frequency of rejecters both in the parasite-prone and in the parasite-free patch decreases toward zero for intermediate levels of the dispersal rate. Although the rejecter strategy is more adaptive than the acceptor strategy in the parasite-prone patch, large numbers of acceptors are produced in the parasite-free patch dispersing to the parasitized patch. As the number of individuals in the parasite-free patch increases, parasitism rate can be maintained stable at a high equilibrium level in the parasite-prone patch.

Key words: birds, brood parasite, dispersal, host, metapopulation dynamics, model, rejection behavior, spatial habitat structure.


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