Juvenal Plumage Polymorphism in Yellow Warblers Is Not Associated with Sex
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Polymorphisms of the juvenal plumage in birds have received little study in comparison to other plumages. We investigate a polymorphism in the juvenal plumage of the Yellow Warbler (Setophaga petechia) in southeastern Ontario, Canada. Yellow Warblers in juvenal plumage show either yellow or white plumage on their lower ventral surface of the neck, breast, and belly, and these differences have been speculated to be associated with sex. We tested the hypothesis that juvenal plumage color varies with sex by using blood samples to molecularly sex 10 yellow and 14 white nestlings. We found no relationship between plumage color and sex (yellow nestlings: 70% male, 30% female; white nestlings: 64% male, 36% female). Using the same 24 nestlings that we sexed, we measured feather color with a spectrometer and found that white and yellow morphs differ significantly in reflectance spectra of red and yellow chroma. Of 66 nestlings whose plumage color we visually inspected in the wild, 73% were white and 27% were yellow, showing that white nestlings are more common than yellow in our study population. We propose alternative explanations for the possible significance of yellow and white polymorphism in the juvenal plumage of the Yellow Warbler.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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 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".