Increased investigation of manipulated clutches suggests egg recognition without rejection in a Brown-headed Cowbird (<i>Molothrus ater</i>) host, the Yellow Warbler (<i>Setophaga petechia</i>)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Egg discrimination underlies the evolution of a host's ability to reject a brood parasite's egg, but some hosts do not reject if it is too costly or if the parasitic egg mimics the host egg. We examined cues used by the Yellow Warbler (Setophaga petechia), a host of the Brown-headed Cowbird (Molothrus ater), in its decision to reject (bury or desert) experimentally parasitized clutches. Yellow Warblers that returned to nests after a model egg was added spent significantly more time peering at and probing their nest contents and shuffling than before eggs were added. Rejection probability increased with the proportion of time Yellow Warblers probed their nest contents after settling on their clutch. Accepters and rejecters, however, peered at or shuffled their eggs the same amount of time and visited the nest and probed its contents (before settling) the same number of times. Burial occurred at 29 of 144 nests (20.1%) experimentally parasitized with model cowbird eggs, of which 14 nests survived long enough for replacement clutches to be parasitized. Only one of the 14 (7.1%) females that initially buried parasitized clutches buried again when the replacement clutch was parasitized, whereas the others accepted their parasitized replacement clutch. Repeated parasitism revealed that an individual's response to parasitic eggs is plastic and that it may reject or forgo rejection after recognizing a parasitism event.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
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".