THE MAFIA....

...hypothesis of brood parasitism.

Or, I learned the most fascinating thing ever today.

Well, we all know that cuckoos are wicked and unpleasant birds with the wicked and unpleasant habit of laying their own eggs in other birds’ nests, so that the other birds hatch the eggs for them. And then the baby cuckoos hatch sooner and grow faster, and they kick the mama bird’s real babies right out of the nest. This is nice for the parasite cuckoo mama, who doesn’t have to do any work, and nice for the parasite cuckoo babies, who get to throw other baby birds out of the nest, but not so nice for the host mama, whose reproductive success is diminished, or for the host babies, who end up dead and splatty at the bottom of the tree while their mamas give free worms to their murderers.

Or possibly the host babies fall out of the nest, don’t die on impact, and, lacking the tenacity of the Are You My Mother? bird (You are not my mother! You are a Snort!), die anyway because of no mama to feed them. Poor little birds.

Well, I’ve known about this for a while. But today I learned one of the theories for why the host mamas put up with this crap instead of evolving out of it (because it really, really doesn’t benefit them reproductively), and it is so fascinating. It’s called THE MAFIA HYPOTHESIS. Basically, the notion is that host mamas who try to get rid of parasite (cuckoo) eggs that show up in their nests get targeted by the cuckoos. The cuckoos come to check on their eggs, and if the host mama has ejected the parasite cuckoo eggs from her nest, the cuckoo up and dumps out all of the host mama’s eggs. So that instead of having fewer of her own babies as a result of cuckoo activities, the host mama ends up with no babies. Some studies have shown that host mamas who eject parasite eggs have a massively higher likelihood of ending up having their nests plundered AND IT IS THE CUCKOO WHO PLUNDERS THEM.

THAT IS RIGHT. DO NOT MESS WITH THE CUCKOOS. THEY WILL KILL YOUR CHILDREN.

I have three equally strong reactions to this. One, this is fascinating and I wonder if Neil Gaiman knows about this, he with the love for writing about cuckoos. Two, cuckoos are fucking terrifying. And three, I sort of wish my sisters and I had known about this when we were little and we used to play the game where I was the mama bird and Robyn and Erin Molly were my little baby birds, and Anna would only play if she could be the cat. But I bet she would have played if she could have been The Recurring Evil Cuckoo Character. It would have been great. There could have been epic battles, man.