Importance of spatial habitat structure on establishment of host defenses against brood parasitism

We used metapopulation dynamics to develop a mathematical simulation model for brood parasites and their hosts in order to investigate the validity of the "spatial habitat structure hypothesis," which states that a low level of parasite egg rejection in host populations is due to the immigration of acceptor individuals from nonparasitized populations. In our model, we varied dispersal rate and the relative carrying capacity of host individuals in parasitized and unparasitized patches. When both the relative carrying capacity in the parasite-free patch and the dispersal rate increase, the nonparasitized patch will provide more acceptor individuals to the parasite-prone patch. As the relative carrying capacity in the parasite-free patch increases, the equilibrium frequency of rejecters both in the parasite-prone and in the parasite-free patch decreases toward zero for intermediate levels of the dispersal rate. Although the rejecter strategy is more adaptive than the acceptor strategy in the parasite-prone patch, large numbers of acceptors are produced in the parasite-free patch dispersing to the parasitized patch. As the number of individuals in the parasite-free patch increases, parasitism rate can be maintained stable at a high equilibrium level in the parasite-prone patch. Copyright 2006.