Do female<i>Drosophila melanogaster</i>adaptively bias offspring sex ratios in relation to the age of their mate?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Modification of offspring sex ratios in response to parental quality is predicted when the long-term fitness returns of sons and daughters differ. One factor that may influence a mother's sex allocation decision is the quality (or attractiveness) of her mate. We investigated whether the sex ratios of offspring produced by female Drosophila melanogaster are biased with respect to the age of the males to which they are mated, and whether there is an adaptive basis for this phenomenon. We found that females mated to old males (13 d post-eclosion) initially produced a greater proportion of daughters than did females mated to young males (1 d post-eclosion). This pattern does not appear to be due to a systematic difference in the numbers or mortality of the X- and Y-bearing sperm originating from old and young fathers, as the overall sex ratios of all offspring produced from a single copulation did not differ between broods fathered by the two types of males. The sons of older males fared worse in competitive mating assays than did the sons of younger males, while daughters of old and young males were of comparable fitness. These results suggest that there is an adaptive basis for the observed sex ratio modification.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| 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) | 0.001 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".