DR. MERCEDES MOLINA MORALES | Postdoctoral researcher Juan de la Cierva- Incorporación (University of Granada)

She is working in three lines of research; seed dispersal by a scatter hoarder corvid, interactions between a brood parasite and host and avian cognition.

During her thesis she carried out a longitudinal study with the aim of studying the main host defenses against parasitism, studying egg rejection, the main defense against brood parasitism, throughout the life of the females.

This behaviour, that reduces the costs of parasitism, is complex from a cognitive perspective, because individuals must distinguish their own eggs from parasite eggs, using different cognitive skills such as learning, memory and decision- making. Many cognitive processes are positively related at the individual level, suggesting the existence of some degree of general intelligence, which varies between individuals.

At the present, she is involved in a project whose main objectives are to explore for the first time the possible relationship between egg rejection and cognitive abilities in magpies, quantifying in the same individuals their ability to reject eggs, their performance in a set of
cognitive tasks and the size of their brain and some of its areas; and to determine whether cognitive performance changes with age (as it does egg rejection behaviour) and finally the fitness consequences of the variation in cognitive abilities.

Personal Website: https://scholar.google.es/citations?user=Bwbb6T4AAAAJ&hl=es&oi=ao

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PublicaTIONS

  • Molina‐Morales, M., Martínez, J. G., Martín‐Gálvez, D., Dawson, D. A., Burke, T., & Avilés, J. M. (2014). Cuckoo hosts shift from accepting to rejecting parasitic eggs across their lifetime. Evolution, 68(10), 3020-3029.

  • Molina-Morales, M., Castro, J., Albaladejo, G., & Parejo, D. (2020). Precise cache detection by olfaction in a scatter-hoarder bird. Animal Behaviour, 167, 185-191.

  • Castro, J., Sáez, C., & Molina-Morales, M. (2022). The monk parakeet (Myiopsitta monachus) as a potential pest for agriculture in the Mediterranean basin. Biological Invasions, 24(4), 895-903.

  • Molina-Morales, M., Gómez, J., Liñán-Cembrano, G., Precioso, M., Martínez, J. G., & Avilés, J. M. (2021). The Role of Intra-Clutch Variation of Magpie Clutches in Foreign Egg Rejection Depends on the Egg Trait Considered. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, 9,702637.