The price of insulation: costs and benefits of feather delivery to nests for male tree swallows <i>Tachycineta bicolor</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many species of birds line their nests with feathers, and it has been hypothesized that this functions to provide a thermally stable microenvironment for the development of eggs and nestlings. Feathers in the nest may also function as a mechanism for parasite control, providing a physical barrier that protects nestlings from ectoparasites. We tested these hypotheses by performing a feather removal and addition experiment in tree swallows Tachycineta bicolor , a species well‐known for lining their nests with feathers. While we found no evidence that quantity of feathers in nests influenced the ability of females to produce and incubate eggs, offspring in well‐feathered nests had longer flight feathers and were structurally larger just prior to fledging that those in nests with fewer feathers. Furthermore, we also demonstrated a positive correlation between feathers and the abundance of larval blow flies Protocalliphora spp. in nests, a result opposite to that predicted by the anti‐parasite hypothesis. While our study provides strong support for the insulation hypothesis, we also discuss the possibility that devoting time to feather gathering may result in males losing paternity in their nests, although manipulative studies will be necessary to fully evaluate this idea.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".