Sex‐biased aggression and male‐only care at sea in Brünnich’s Guillemots<i>Uria lomvia</i>and Razorbills<i>Alca torda</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In several groups in the order Charadriformes, biparental care is followed by a period of male‐only care. Several hypotheses attempting to explain extended male parental care in shorebirds do not fit the Alcini. In a previous study of Brünnich’s GuillemotsUria lomviaand RazorbillsAlca torda, we did not find support for female‐biased parental effort at the breeding site that would lead to males being in better condition to care for chicks at sea. However, in both species, males spent more off‐duty time at the breeding site than females, suggesting greater involvement in the defence of egg or chick, breeding site and mate. We predicted that there would be a male bias in size and aggressive behaviour associated with parental roles. To test this, body size and aggression of attending male and female Brünnich’s Guillemots and Razorbills were measured during incubation and brooding on the Gannet Islands, Labrador. Parental aggression was measured using natural observations of all agonistic interactions and, in Razorbills only,in situresponses to presentations of a predator model. In both species, males were significantly larger than females in culmen and gape length. Guillemot males initiated agonistic interactions more frequently than females during incubation. In contrast, female Guillemots were subjected to aggression more frequently than males and as a result were involved in more fights. In addition, the few chicks that were seen to die were being attended by single females. During the brooding period, Razorbill males responded aggressively to intruders more frequently than females, made more aggressive responses than females, and responded aggressively more frequently and more intensely than females to a predator model. In both species there was a similar male bias in morphology and behaviour that is consistent with male parents being more capable of protecting their chick, a probable advantage to chick survival during the uniparental care phase of some Charadriformes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".