Female American goldfinches use carotenoid-based bill coloration to signal status
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Interest in female ornamentation has burgeoned recently, and evidence suggests that carotenoid-based female coloration may function as a mate-choice signal. However, the possibility that females may signal status with coloration has been all but ignored. Bill coloration of female American goldfinches (Spinustristis) changes seasonally, from dull gray in winter to bright orange in the breeding season. We conducted a series of aviary experiments in the breeding season to examine the signaling role of female bill color during both intra- and intersexual contests as well as during male mate choice. We tested for status signaling by examining whether caged females and males avoided feeding adjacent to female taxidermic models as a function of the model's bill color, which was experimentally augmented or dulled. We tested for a mate signaling function by giving captive males a choice between 2 live females with experimentally altered bill colors. Females avoided feeding near model females with colorful bills, but males showed neither avoidance of nor preference for females with more colorful bills. These results indicate that the female's carotenoid-based bill coloration signals status during competitive interactions and suggest that female bill color does not function as a mate-choice signal. This represents the first experimental evidence that a carotenoid-based coloration of females functions to mediate contest competition over food.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 |
| 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 it