A role for endogenous opiates in incubation behavior in ring neck doves (Streptopelia risoria)

Egg burial in the ringneck dove (Streptopelia risoria): A potential laboratory model system for egg-rejection research?

“…Accordingly, in out of six videotaped rejections, in two cases the males, in three cases the females, and in one case both sexes were involved. Furthermore, doves already serve as a neuroethological model species for the analyses of pair-bonding (Burns-Cusato & Cusato, 2013) and parental care (Burns-Cusato et al, 2021) in captivity, allowing a suite of neuro/physiological manipulations to be also applied and queried in future studies in the context of parental care versus egg-rejection behaviors (Abolins-Abols & Hauber, 2018). For example, previous work established that both corticosterone and prolactin can serve alone to up- or downregulate, respectively, the propensity of egg-rejection behaviors in Turdus thrushes in response to model parasite eggs; however, both of these studies were conducted on females only because in Turdus thrushes the female is typically the incubating (and egg rejecting) sex (reviewed in Ruiz-Raya, 2021).…”

“…Our focal species, the ringneck dove ( Streptopelia risoria ) has already served as a critically useful captive model systems for biopsychological, including physiological and neural, studies of reproductive behaviors (e.g., endocrine aspects of pair-bonding and biparental care; Burns-Cusato & Cusato, 2013; Burns-Cusato et al, 2021) and, therefore, their use in the behavioral context of egg rejection would not be met by the need to develop novel husbandry and analytical methods and techniques. However, these doves are also not known to serve as hosts to brood parasitic species in the wild and are phylogenetically closer to parasitic cuckoos than to most lineages of actual (egg rejecter) host species (Feng et al, 2020), thereby limiting the ecological validity and generalizability of our method development and the resulting conclusions.…”