: The reproductive life of a cuckoo is both easy---it lays its eggs in others birds' nests, and lets them feed the young---and difficult: cuckoos are involved in an "evolutionary arms race" with other birds, finds a new study. Even as cuckoos improve their counterfeiting skills---producing eggs that look more like others birds'---the host birds get better and better at identifying the forged eggs. How the Heck:
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Knowing that birds have four types of color-sensitive cone cells in their eyes, allowing them to see ultraviolet wavelengths, researchers used a spectroscope to measure the amount of light reflected from hundreds of cuckoo and host-bird eggs. They then fed this data into models to produce images showing how birds see the different types of eggs.
They discovered that while cuckoo and redstart eggs have a high degree of color overlap, cuckoo eggs targeted for dunnock nests did not.
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