Social foraging and the evolution of white plumage
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The significance of social foraging to the evolution of avian plumage traits has received little attention. White plumage could increase conspicuousness against a dark background and serve as a passive recruitment signal to attract distant foraging companions. White plumage could thus be selected if white individuals obtain net fitness benefits by attracting conspecifics to feeding flocks. Species that benefit little from the presence of foraging companions should have a darker, more cryptic coloration to avoid attracting potential competitors. Flash marks – white patches on wings or tails, often hidden until individuals take flight – could also be more common in social species if such marks serve to increase flock cohesion. In a data set including pairs of closely related species with contrasting foraging sociality, social species possessed overall whiter plumage than non-social species but did not exhibit a higher frequency of flash marks. Several traits, such as habitat type, plumage dichromatism, male body mass, sexual size dimorphism, prey type, level of prey activity and social mating system, which could all influence plumage characteristics on their own, were not related to social foraging or to the expression of plumage traits. This study provides empirical support across a wide range of species for a relationship between social foraging and white plumage coloration in birds.
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.
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 it