Marked Shifts in Offspring Size Elicited by Frequent Fusion among Siblings in an Internally Brooding Marine Invertebrate
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While offspring size is a widely studied concept in evolutionary ecology, mechanisms affecting offspring phenotype in species with postzygotic parental care are incompletely understood. We examined the impact of sibling fusion on ontogenetic shifts in offspring size in the brooding sea anemone Urticina felina. Fusion occurred among brood-protected embryos in U. felina, whereas it occurred postrelease among settlers of corals studied here and previously. Two fusion products were evidenced: morphologically aberrant offspring and large homogeneous offspring coined "megalarvae." The frequent occurrence (∼77%) of megalarvae identifies them as the primary fusion product, which drove an increase in offspring size and within-clutch size variation before release. Lipid signatures suggest that morphologically aberrant juveniles represent by-products that do not reach adulthood. Not only were occurrences of megalarvae common in the populations studied, they increased with maternal fecundity, suggesting that sibling fusion may be a form of kin cooperation integral to the reproductive success of U. felina, warranting investigation in other live-bearing invertebrate taxa.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".