Do nestling Tree Swallows (<i>Tachycineta bicolor</i>) respond to parental alarm calls?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Nestling birds use a conspicuous begging display, which includes loud begging calls, to solicit food from their parents. Although these calls are important in communicating offspring need, predators can use begging calls to locate nests. Parents may, however, counteract nestling vulnerability by giving alarm calls to silence calling nestlings when predators are nearby. This defense has been observed in grass- and reed-nesting species, whose nestlings beg to vibrational cues of a parent's arrival, even in the absence of the parents. It is considered less likely to occur, however, in cavity-nesting species, because the rigid substrate of the nest does not provide vibrational cues, and nestlings instead wait for a parental food call before begging. Cavity-nesting Tree Swallows (Tachycineta bicolor) use food calls to solicit begging, which suggests that parental alarm calls are not required to silence them. Older nestling Tree Swallows, however, beg in the absence of their parents, which suggests that responding to parental alarm calls with silence might be adaptive after all, at least at older ages. The goal of our study was to determine whether nestling Tree Swallows alter their begging behavior in response to parental alarm calls and, if so, whether this response varies with age. We found that older nestlings (15 days posthatch) reduced calling and crouched in the nest in response to playback of parental alarm calls, unlike younger nestlings (5 and 10 days posthatch). Our results suggest that parent Tree Swallows might reduce predation risk caused by calling nestlings, especially older nestlings, by giving alarm calls when predators are near their nests. Counter to our prediction, nestlings of cavity-nesting species may indeed respond to alarm calls, particularly if they beg in the absence of parents.
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.
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 | 0.001 | 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".