Mate Choice and Colored Beak Spots of King Penguins
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The theory of sexual selection explains sexual dimorphisms in ornaments used in mate choice. Mutual mate choice is a form of sexual selection that might explain sexually monomorphic ornamental traits. Under mutual mate choice, both sexes select partners based on the same ornament. We tested the mutual mate choice hypothesis in a mutually ornamented seabird, the king penguin ( Aptenodytes patagonicus ), through observations of the pair formation process in the field. Penguins that were ready to mate formed displaying pairs at the edge of the colony. Some of these pairs moved into the breeding colony and produced an egg (definitive pairs), while other pairs separated and often switched to another potential partner (temporary pairs). Colored ornaments were quantified using color vision modeling. We predicted that birds would mate assortatively by their elaborate ornamental traits (specifically, colors of beak spots, auricular patches of feathers, and breast patch of feathers). We also predicted that definitive pairs would exhibit more elaborate ornaments than temporary pairs. The mutual mate choice hypothesis was supported by assortative pairing for color of the beak spots, but not for color or size of the auricular patches or for the color of the breast patch. An alternative hypothesis was also consistent with our results, that female choice for a male ornamental trait and superior female condition associated with the same trait produced assortative pairing patterns. More UV ‐ and yellow‐colored beak spots for females in definitive than temporary pairs supported the female choice hypothesis over the mutual mate choice hypothesis, but previous experimental results from altered beak spot colors supported the latter. Evidence to date thus supports both the mutual mate choice and female choice hypotheses.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".