Together with Steven Portugal (Royal Holloway University of London), Ros Gloag (University of Sydney), and Claire Spottiswoode (University of Cape Town / University of Cambridge), we now have a special issue on brood parasitism published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.
Our goal was to bring together (i) research that was using new approaches to answer long-standing questions or challenge assumptions (hyperlinks lead to example papers from the issue), and to (ii) include studies on brood parasites from across the animal kingdom. Although widespread in animals from insects, fish, and birds, papers on brood parasitism rarely cite each other across these taxonomic boundaries, as we show in our Introduction article (also find a pdf here). We then included (iii) reviews and opinion articles that presented new ideas and ways of thinking about brood parasitism. In this way, we hoped that the special issue would be like reciprocal co-evolution: new approaches sparking new ideas, that should generate further novel advances.
It was an interesting journey from conception of the issue idea through to final publication, with many of the deadlines coming over the Christmas “break”. But, it was an excellent way to catch up with some of the exciting advances and ideas, and some new examples of brood parasitism that I was less familiar with. Cuckoo fungus!