Layered sexual selection: a comparative analysis of sexual behaviour within an assemblage of piophilid flies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although many theoretical and empirical studies have addressed the dynamics of sexual selection, little is known about the evolution of multiple sexual-selection mechanisms within the same system. I performed a qualitative comparative study of sexual behaviours in seven sympatric species of piophilid flies to identify and compare the apparent mechanisms of sexual selection operating in each system. In each of the seven species I observed several distinct types of malemale and malefemale interactions, potentially representing multiple mechanisms of sexual selection. Malemale interactions included scramble competition and, in some species, bouts of intense combat. Malefemale interactions exhibited two distinct patterns: (1) some form of premounting courtship followed by a simple copulatory sequence or (2) no premounting courtship but palpation behaviours during the copulatory sequence. Either pattern was combined with malefemale struggle in some species. In two species, male mating success also appeared to depend on the ability to overcome a "revealing obstacle", a female adaptation that exposed variation in male performance without direct assessment or struggle. In each species these mechanisms operated in a rough sequence and thus could be viewed as "layers" of sexual selection, with each layer potentially reducing the subset of individuals that have opportunities to compete in the next layer. A brief review of the literature suggests that layered sexual selection is the typical pattern in many animal groups and thus may have important evolutionary consequences.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 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) | 0.001 | 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".