Post‐weaning parental care increases fitness but is not heritable in North American red squirrels
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Most empirical attempts to explain the evolution of parental care have focused on its costs and benefits (i.e. fitness consequences). In contrast, few investigations have been made of the other necessary prerequisite for evolutionary change, inheritance. Here, we examine the fitness consequences and heritability (h(2)) of a post-weaning parental care behaviour (territory bequeathal) in a wild population of North American red squirrels. Each year, a subset (average across all years = 19%) of reproductive females bequeathed their territory to a dependent offspring. Bequeathing females experienced higher annual reproductive success and did not suffer a survival cost to themselves relative to those females retaining their territory. Bequeathing females thus realized higher relative annual fitness [ω = 1.18 ± 0.03 (SE)] than nonbequeathing females [ω = 0.96 ± 0.02 (SE)]. Additive genetic influences on bequeathal behaviour, however, were not significantly different from 0 (h(2) = 1.9 × 10(-3); 95% highest posterior density interval = 3.04 × 10(-8) to 0.37) and, in fact, bequeathal behaviour was not significantly repeatable (R = 2.0 × 10(-3); 95% HPD interval = 0-0.27). In contrast, directional environmental influences were apparent. Females were more likely to bequeath in years following low food abundance and when food availability in the upcoming autumn was high. Despite an evident fitness benefit, a lack of heritable genetic variance will constrain evolution of this trait.
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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 | 0.000 | 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".