Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. The label “parasite” might bring to mind images of hookworms ...

Spot the impostor: A cuckoo finch chick (left) and a tawny-flanked prinia chick (right) open their beaks for a meal. Photo by Claire Spottiswoode Few examples of parasites in nature are as infamous as ...

Some female zebra finches foist a part of their eggs on their neighbors. Scientists in Germany have discovered that in every fifth nest there is one egg that is not produced by its social parents. The ...

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Nature documentaries ripe with images of bouncing birds with crazy ...

Cuckoo finches are bad news to other birds. They are brood parasites, meaning they lay eggs in other species’s nests to trick their victims into raising the finches’ children as their own. This kicked ...

It is not the superior genes of the father, but the mother's resource investment in the eggs that makes zebra finch males particularly attractive. A Swiss-Australian research team has challenged the ...

When you think of parasites, visions of worms and blood-sucking bugs might come to mind. But there are many ways to parasitize a host. Brood parasites are birds that have figured out how to play the ...

William Feeney receives funding from Australian Geographic and the Australian National University. Species must reproduce to survive, and animals have found unique ways of achieving this. For some, ...

When you think about parasites, usually one of the “mind-controlling” types comes to mind, or maybe the chestbursters from the Alien franchise. But in the animal kingdom, particularly among birds, ...