LogFAQs > #942784575

Lokarin posted...

Ah, there's a couple of theories

https://amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/604234/

https://www.pnas.org/content/117/4/2056.short

Basically it's a deathmatch for the first week and then the parents pick favoured children based on their brightness

What a bunch of bullshit. It has nothing to do with parasites and predators. The younger the chick, the more colorful it is. Coots hatch too many chicks in quick succession. Since the chicks range from babies to teenagers, they don't get to be equal in terms of strength. Just imagine human parents constantly breeding and finding yourself as the youngest sibling in a family of ten children. Each sibling is never more than one year older than the next. Now imagine the amount of food being limited and your parents being incapable of distinguishing the age of their children. Imagine having to fight against your older siblings to get your share of the food. Obviously, the fact that you're only a week old and you have siblings much older than you can only mean on thing: you're going to starve to death.

Thankfully, evolution made it so the younger you are, the more colorful you are. Your parents actually favor their colorful children more than those that aren't. They will fight for you, they will give more food to you. If your older siblings even dare to try stealing your bigger share, your parents will move them away, essentially fighting for you. This allows you to grow up and catch up with your older siblings. As you become older, you will eventually lose your colors and your parents will start liking you less, favoring your younger siblings because they're more colorful than you. But at this point, you're strong and capable. Once you're strong enough to live on your own, you'll just leave the nest and found your own family.

The whole parasitic thing makes no sense, because other species of chicks tend to be even less colorful than real coots. In other words, they'll look like the older true chicks but be as weak as the youngest true ones. So now you have the parent favoring its younger and more colorful chicks and actively preventing the parasites from eating enough food because they're seen as being older and more capable. Since they're too young and weak to fight for their share of the food, they die. No parasite birds in their right mind would think about laying their eggs in coot nests.

And your suggestion that the colors are meant to attract predators is absurd. It goes against all the laws of evolution. It makes absolutely no sense to work against your own species' survival and best interests. Although some scientists have wrongly believed the parasite theory to be true, none of them is dumb enough to suggest what you're saying.

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