Stickleback Fights: Why Do Winners Win? Influence of Metabolic and Morphometric Parameters
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Pairs of reproductively mature male three-spined stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus) were introduced into unfamiliar aquaria and observed until one male became dominant. Skin carotenoid content, morphometric indexes, and metabolic capacities of the axial and pectoral muscles were examined to establish whether morphological or physiological parameters differentiated winners and losers. Stickleback that initiated fights typically won. Quick initiation led to quick victory. Overall, winners and losers differed in few morphological or metabolic characteristics, but these properties and the differences between these attributes for losers and winners of specific fights were linked with initiation time and fight duration. Morphometric indexes of losers were the primary determinants of initiation time and fight duration, whereas for winners muscle metabolic capacities were linked to these fight characteristics. The greater the hepatosomatic index (HSI) of losers, the longer the fight initiation times. Similarly, losers with high HSI and carotenoid levels resisted defeat longer. In winners, initiation time decreased as axial muscle phosphofructokinase levels increased and citrate synthase levels decreased, whereas the metabolic capacities of the pectoral muscle were linked with time to achieve victory. When losers had greater HSI values than the winners of a specific fight, fight initiation was delayed and fights lasted longer. When losers had higher carotenoid levels than winners, fights also lasted longer. On the other hand, when losers had more visceral fat (fat body mass over somatic mass) than winners, both initiation time and combat duration were reduced. These results suggest that male stickleback assess their physiological status and that of their opponents, in particular the HSI, and adjust their combat strategies accordingly.
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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 | 0.002 |
| 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".