Asynchronous breeding in the socially monogamous prairie vole
Bibliographic record
Abstract
At least two hypotheses have been proposed for why animals should breed synchronously: (1) to swamp predators and reduce the probability of offspring being killed and (2) to promote monogamy when paternal care is important for offspring survival. Thus prey and monogamous species are likely candidates for synchronous breeding. We conducted an experiment to determine if a prey species, the monogamously breeding prairie vole ( Microtus ochrogaster (Wagner, 1842)), breeds synchronously. We conducted eight replicates in which we placed six nulliparous females and six adult males in semi-natural enclosures for 18–21 days to determine if they bred synchronously. The time of conception ranged from 2 to 18 days within replicates with no indication of breeding synchrony within any of the populations. Thus neither predator avoidance nor paternal care models were supported for prairie voles. We conclude that rodents in general are not good models for breeding synchrony and that females use alternative mating tactics to enhance their lifetime reproductive success. We discuss our results in the context of the prairie vole mating system.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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".