If the host bird identifies the
cuckoo egg, then the host bird may throw the egg away or leave that nest and built a new nest using (16).
Calculate the fitness function for
cuckoo egg. Select the random egg from the nest.
For each iteration g, a
cuckoo egg i is selected randomly and new solutions [x.sub.i](g + 1) are generated by using the Levy flight, a kind of random walk in which the steps are defined in terms of the step lengths, which have a certain probability distribution, with the directions of the steps being isotropic and random.
In other words, by the time the
cuckoo egg is laid, it has had 18 to 24 hours of internal incubation at 40 degrees Centigrade and hatches 31 hours ahead of any host egg laid at the same time.
When the
cuckoo egg hatches, the fledgling ejects any other eggs and young from the nest and then makes as much noise as a whole brood of normal chicks so that the host parents are stimulated to feed it as much as they would several of their own young.
An egg called the
Cuckoo Egg was listed at Faberge's workshop as the Cockerel Egg and a piece called the Orange Tree Egg was originally known in the workshop as the Bay Tree Egg.
"If a bird sees a funny egg in its nest, it might gain if it throws it out and it's a
cuckoo egg," says Payne.
The hypothesis also predicts that this behavior causes hosts to benefit from accepting parasite eggs, because a host that accepts a parasite egg will raise more of its own offspring than a host that ejects the
cuckoo egg (and thereby loses its own clutch later).
If the new egg has a lower quality, the
cuckoo egg will be hatched first and the young cuckoo will kick the new egg out of the nest.