🧵5/5
AI model outperformed participants, including experienced ornithologists! We suggest using our model ideally with information about egg-laying sequence to identify eggs laid by CBP. The complete pipeline is freely available in the suppl. material.

📸 Barn swallow © Vladimír Pokorný

🧵4/5
We used photographs of non-parasitized barn swallow clutches and shuffled eggs to create thousands of parasitized clutches. Then we tested the accuracy of human participants at identification of parasitic eggs and compared it with results of our AI model.

📸 Which one is the parasitic egg?

🧵3/5
CBP is still quite a mystery, partially because it is hard to reveal it. Eggs laid by parasitic and host females look often very similar and therefore genetic markers has been recommended to reveal this reproductive strategy.

📸 Barn swallow eggs with numbers showing the egg-laying sequence

🧵2/5
Conspecific brood parasitism (CBP), where females lay eggs in nests of other females of the same species, is in birds relatively common. It has been observed especially in waterfowl (pochards, goldeneyes, coots) but also in songbirds (swallows, sparrows, starlings).

📸 Common goldeneye female

🧵1/5 Excited about our new paper in PRSB! @royalsocietypublishing.org

Can AI make research on avian brood parasitism easier? YES!
We show that AI model can identify conspecific parasitic eggs better than an average ornithologist.
doi.org/10.1098/rspb...

📸 Barn swallow – our study species.

Our fieldwork on brood parasitism of common cuckoos started well, with so far 11 caught individuals! When catching these charismatic birds, there are usually also interesting bycatches :) @ivb-cas.bsky.social @rytikerttunen.bsky.social @lisandrinamari.bsky.social