Gaping Displays Reveal and Amplify a Mechanically Based Index of Weapon Performance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Physical prowess, a key determinant of fight outcomes, is contingent on whole-organism performance traits. The advertisement of performance, via display, is poorly understood because it is unclear how information about performance is encoded into display characteristics. Previous studies have shown that weapon performance (i.e., bite force) predicts dominance and reproductive success in male lizards. We tested the hypothesis that gaping displays by adult male collared lizards (Crotaphytus) can provide an index of weapon performance by exposing the major jaw-adductor muscle complex and that white patches at the mouth corners amplify this index. For territorial adult males, the breadth of the muscle complex, which is not correlated with body size, was a strong predictor of bite force. For nonterritorial yearling males and females, however, measures of body and head size predicted bite force. The patches are highly conspicuous, exhibit UV-reflecting properties within the visual range of lizards, and provide size-independent information about bite force only in adult males. We conclude that exposure of the muscle complex during gaping displays can provide rival males with a reliable, body-size independent, biomechanically based index of weapon performance, an index that the mouth-corner patches amplify. Indexes that transmit information through mechanistic links to performance are expected to be widespread among animals.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.000 |
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".