Within‐brood distribution of ectoparasite attacks on nestling blue tits: a test of the tasty chick hypothesis using inulin as a tracer
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Blow fly ( Protocalliphora spp.) larvae are nest ectoparasites that compete with nestlings for resources by feeding on blood. Their main direct consequences on nestlings are a reduction in growth, blood parameters, and physiological performance. The impact of Protocalliphora larvae on nestling development can be extremely variable between nests within years and between years due to varying food availability. However, there is also considerable within‐nest variation in nestling growth and development which has been attributed to an aggregation of ectoparasites on less resistant chicks; the tasty chick hypothesis. We tested for aggregated attacks of Protocalliphora within broods of nestling blue tits using radio‐labelled inulin to trace plasma, and hence blood, turnover. To estimate blood removal by Protocalliphora, we compared inulin turnover in naturally parasitized and experimentally deparasitized nestlings. Inulin turnover, and hence the blood loss attributed to Protocalliphora attacks, was significantly correlated with chick mass and size rank within the brood, with the smallest and lowest‐ranking chicks showing greatest inulin turnover. This is the first study demonstrating non‐random blood‐feeding by Protocalliphora larvae, a phenomenon which can render the statistical detection of their impact problematical by increasing within‐brood variance in developmental and physiological measures.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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".