Courtship displays and mounting calls are honest, condition-dependent signals that influence mounting success in Hermann's tortoises
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Like other terrestrial tortoises, the courtship behaviour of Hermann's tortoises (Testudo hermanni Gmelin, 1789) is based on a multiple signalling system that involves visual, olfactory, tactile, and acoustic signals. In this study, we analysed relationships between male morphology, hematological profile, courtship intensity, vocalizations, and mounting success in Hermann's tortoises breeding in semi-natural enclosures to investigate the effects of male condition on signals exhibited during courtship and on their mounting success. Results showed that mounting success of Hermann's tortoise males was positively affected by the number of sexual interactions/h, number of bites given to the female during interactions, and by call rate and frequency-modulation range. Call rate, frequency-modulation range, and number of sexual interaction/h increased with hematocrit value, while number of bites given to females decreased with leukocyte concentration. In conclusion, courtship signals exhibited by Hermann's tortoise males, including vocalizations, reliably reveal different components of male condition, and females may use these multiple traits to choose high-quality partners. This is the first study documenting the condition-dependent nature of tortoise courting signals and their effect on male mounting success.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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".