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Genetic evidence for female host-specific races of the common cuckoo

Nature volume 407, pages 183–186 (2000)Cite this article

Abstract

The common cuckoo Cuculus canorus is divided into host-specific races (gentes)1. Females of each race lay a distinctive egg type that tends to match the host's eggs, for instance, brown and spotted for meadow pipit hosts or plain blue for redstart hosts2,3,4. The puzzle is how these gentes remain distinct. Here, we provide genetic evidence that gentes are restricted to female lineages, with cross mating by males maintaining the common cuckoo genetically as one species. We show that there is differentiation between gentes in maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA, but not in microsatellite loci of nuclear DNA. This supports recent behavioural evidence that female, but not male, common cuckoos specialize on a particular host5, and is consistent with the possibility that genes affecting cuckoo egg type are located on the female-specific W sex chromosome6. Our results also support the ideas that common cuckoos often switched hosts during evolution7,8, and that some gentes may have multiple, independent origins, due to colonization by separate ancestral lineages.

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Figure 1: Unrooted, maximum parsimony trees for cuckoo mtDNA haplotypes from Great Britain (a) and Japan (b).

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Acknowledgements

We thank L. De Sousa, L. M. Tabak and M. Ramon for help in the lab, and A. Baker, P. Fu, B. Golding, A. Lotem, R. A. Morton, R. B. Payne, T. D. Price and E. Røskaft for discussion and comments. Funded by grants from NSERC (Canada) (H.L.G.), Boston University (M.D.S.), SERC (UK) and NERC (UK) (N.B.D.), and a NATO Postdoctoral Fellowship (K.M.) H.L.G. thanks S. I. Rothstein for initiating part of this collaboration by introducing him to H.N.

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Author notes

  1. Karen Marchetti

    Present address: Department of Biology 0116, University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, California, 92093, USA

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biology, McMaster University, Hamilton, L8S 4K1, Ontario, Canada

    H. Lisle Gibbs & Karen Marchetti

  2. Department of Biology, Boston University, Boston, 02215, Massachusetts, USA

    Michael D. Sorenson

  3. Department of Zoology, Downing Street University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB2 3EJ, UK

    M. de L. Brooke & N. B. Davies

  4. Faculty of Education, Shinshu University , Nagano, 380, Japan

    Hiroshi Nakamura

Authors
  1. H. Lisle Gibbs
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  2. Michael D. Sorenson
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  3. Karen Marchetti
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  4. M. de L. Brooke
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  5. N. B. Davies
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  6. Hiroshi Nakamura
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Correspondence to H. Lisle Gibbs.

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Gibbs, H., Sorenson, M., Marchetti, K. et al. Genetic evidence for female host-specific races of the common cuckoo . Nature 407, 183–186 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1038/35025058

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