Extreme Levels of Multiple Mating Characterize the Mating System of the Saltmarsh Sparrow (<i>Ammodramus caudacutus</i>)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We studied mating patterns in Saltmarsh Sparrows (Ammodramus caudacutus), a species with no territorial defense, no paternal care, and no pair bonds. Fifty-seven of 60 broods with at least 2 sampled chicks (and all broods that were completely sampled) resulted from multiple mating by females. About one-third of the broods had a different father for each chick, but the most common pattern, found in 36 of 60 nests, was multiple sires, with at least 1 male having sired 2 or more chicks. The level of multiple paternity in Saltmarsh Sparrows may be the highest documented in any bird. Levels of multiple mating increased with population density but not with nesting synchrony. We were able to assign paternity to particular males for about half the 206 chicks that were genotyped. Males sired chicks as far as 1.4 km from their original capture site, and some males sired chicks in multiple nests, separated by up to 0.5 km. We also document a case of 2 females laying eggs in the same nest.
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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 | 0.001 | 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".