Social correlates of reproductive success in false clown anemonefish: subordinate group members do not pay-to-stay
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In group-territorial species, subordinate group members may affect the reproductive success of a dominant, breeding pair. Dominants should be choosy, evicting subordinates whose presence does not increase reproductive success in favour of those whose presence is beneficial. I examined correlations between components of reproductive success and measures of social group composition in false clown anemonefish (Amphiprion ocellaris), in which breeding pairs tolerate subordinates that could be expelled from sea anemone hosts. Statistical interactions between group members' lengths, including interactions with the length of a non-breeding subordinate, were significantly better predictors of clutch size than a female's absolute length. For large females, clutch size increased with the length of the largest subordinate. The relationship between laying frequency and group composition was similar to that of clutch size, except that the statistical interaction was between subordinate and male, not female, length. Hatching success was not correlated with female length or with the length of the largest subordinate. Hatching success was correlated with the interaction between male length and the total number of subordinates; on average, hatching success declined as group size increased but the effect direction reversed at larger male lengths. Because clutch size and laying frequency were not correlated with a subordinate's size directly, but rather with interactions among group members' lengths, and because hatching success on average declined with group size, I conclude that the presence of subordinates did not have a positive effect on a breeding pair's reproductive success - that is, there is no evidence that subordinate false clown anemonefish pay-to-stay. This result is surprising given the ease with which a breeding anemonefish pair can evict non-beneficial subordinates.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 teacher head, 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".