Table 3.

The responses of redstarts to artificial egg parasitism experiments and natural parasitism events

Treatment	Number	Ejected	Deserted	Accepted (%)
Manipulated nests
Control (touch)	89	0	5	84 (94.4)
Mimetic
Blue model	12	2	2	8 (66.7)
Conspecific	14	0	0	14 (100.0)
Non-mimetic
Spotted model	13	6	1	6 (46.2)
Immaculate model	7	2	0	5 (71.4)
Spotted own egg	17	0	1	16 (94.1)
Black own egg	22	10	2	10 (45.5)
Blue great tit egg	25	19	0	6 (24.0)
Cuckoo egg	73	0	1	72 (98.6)
Rim cuckoo egg put-in	21	0	2	19 (90.5)
Non-manipulated nests
Parasitiseda	43	0	8	35 (81.4)
Non-parasitisedb	–	–	–	–

All experimental nests are detailed with the number of ejected, deserted and accepted outcomes. We do not have any ‘Excluded’ nests (cf. [24]) because we effectively prevented predation by using nails (see Methods and Fig. 1a). Additional to the mimetic blue ‘redstart’ type model and the non-mimetic spotted (speckled) model (see [24]) we used several other treatments. Data on conspecific eggs (natural host eggs) are from the present study; data on blue, spotted and immaculate (creamy white) models are from [32]; data on own eggs painted with spots or completely black are from [34], and here we additionally included the deserted nests missing in the original study. We use the terms ‘mimetic’ and ‘non-mimetic’ as terms describing the relative similarity between experimental and the host’s own eggs (i.e., not in the absolute objective sense: [37]) and to facilitate the comparison with the same categories as understood by [24]

^aEffectively parasitised nests where at least one cuckoo egg was naturally laid into the host nest cup

^bAccording to our standard protocol that we use in all our studies (e.g., [7, 16, 28, 32, 34]), eggs in all nests were touched, handled and measured, therefore we do not have nests without any manipulation as [24] did