Gang Brooding in Canada Geese: Role of Parental Condition and Experience
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Some Canada Geese (Branta canadensis) raise their broods by themselves (two-parent families), while others raise them in gang broods, defined as two or more broods amalgamated into a single cohesive unit and shepherded by four or more parents. From 1984 to 2005, I individually marked Canada Geese in New Haven County, Connecticut, so that I could compare the characteristics of adults that raise their goslings in gang broods to those of adults that raised their goslings in two-parent families. I wanted to determine if a parent's decision to form a gang brood was influenced by its age or body mass, its own parents (indicating either that the behavior has a genetic component or that the behavior is learned while a gosling), its prior experiences raising broods, or the loss of its mate. Parents tended to use the same brood-rearing approach from one year to the next: 61% of parents of gang broods (i.e., gang-brooders) during one year also were gang-brooders the next year they had goslings; likewise, 65% of parents in two-parent families during one year raised their next brood in a two-parent family. Geese that changed mates from the previous year were more likely to switch brood-rearing approaches than those that stayed with the same mate. As geese gained more years of experience raising goslings, their propensity to form a gang brood increased; only 29% of geese raising broods for the first time formed a gang brood versus 80% for geese with 5 or more years of experience. Geese raised in gang broods themselves were no more likely than geese raised in two-parent families to form gang broods once they became adults and had their own broods. These results indicate that gang brooding is a behavior learned as an adult. I tested the hypothesis that adult geese attending the same gang brood are members of the same extended family but found that geese were as likely to form a gang brood with unrelated individuals as with siblings or parents.
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.
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 | 0.000 |
| 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".