7 Abstract Bird nests protect eggs and nestlings, allowing the parents to leave their offspring and subsequently return to them. Their thermoregulatory properties reduce energetic costs of incubation and brooding of nestlings. For all these reasons, nests are key structures for the reproduction of a majority of avian species and as such they should be subject to natural selection. Several hypotheses describing selection pressures which affect the size of nests or some of their parts have been suggested. In my PhD thesis, I investigated some of them in the great reed warbler (Acrocephalus arundinaceus) - an open nesting passerine species with very variable nest size. For this purpose, I used a large dataset of several hundred measured great reed warbler nests, nest enlargement experiments and an experiment with artificial nests. In accordance with previous studies, we did not find that nest size affects the probability of common cuckoo (Cuculus canorus) brood parasitism, while it was influenced by other factors, such as timing of breeding, reed density around the nest and nest visibility from the nearest potential cuckoo perch site. More interestingly, we found that cuckoos adjust their nest-searching strategy in relation to availability of host nests. When host nests were scarce, cuckoos parasitized all of...

One of the best ways how hosts may defend their clutch against brood parasitism is recognition and rejection of parasitic eggs. It has been documented that ability to percept UV light in birds affects their behaviour. By using a spectrophotometer we found that Reed Warbler (Acrocephalus scirpaceus) eggs and Common cuckoo (Cuculus canorus) eggs differ mainly in brightness but also in UV hue. We investigated the influence of birds' UV vision on recognition and rejection of parasitic eggs. Therefore we performed three experiments to reveal the role of eggshell UV reflectance on egg rejection in this host. In the first experiment, we parasitized clutches with artificial white eggs differing only in UV reflectance (UV- and UV+). In the other two, we experimentally reduced UV reflectance from conspecific and host own eggs. We used a UV light blocker, which did not influence the reflectance shape in the other parts of spectra. As a control we used a group of conspecific and own eggs coated in Vaseline, which did not affect eggshell reflectance. In each experiment, we monitored host response to parasitic eggs. Because the Reed Warbler's eggs reflect UV radiation themselves, we expected that white UV- eggs would be rejected as well as the eggs coated in UV blocker at a higher rate than white UV+ eggs and...

This diploma thesis deals with evolutionary algorithms used for travelling salesman problem (TSP). In the first section, there are theoretical foundations of a graph theory and computational complexity theory. Next section contains a description of chosen optimization algorithms. The aim of the diploma thesis is to implement an application that solve TSP using evolutionary algorithms.