Acoustic interactions in broods of begging nestling birds
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Begging by nestling birds has become a model system in the study of the evolution of reliable signaling. The transmission and reception of begging signals, however, remain largely unexplored. Especially puzzling is how, or indeed whether, the calls that accompany most begging displays can convey information to parents, given that several nestlings may be calling at once within the cramped confines of the nest. Most previous work on groups of acoustic signalers has involved signalers that are much more widely spaced, such as chorusing insects and frogs. Here, we review our research on how the begging calls of tree swallows, Tachycineta bicolor, convey information to parents. Various call features correlate with nestling need, and playing back calls to parents affects both how often they deliver food to the nest and which nestling they feed once they arrive. Nestlings adjust their calls in response to signal interference, albeit crudely, by adjusting call rate and amplitude. Begging calls and the contexts in which they occur vary enormously across species, so that other species likely use different strategies to overcome acoustic interference. Indeed, begging displays offer promising and barely tapped opportunities for developmental and comparative studies of acoustic signaling in groups.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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) | 0.001 | 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".