The link between sexual dimorphism, activity budgets, and group cohesion: the case of the plains zebra (<i>Equus burchelli</i>)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Animals that differ in reproductive status and body size have different needs in terms of foraging and resting. In most social ungulates this leads to sexual segregation, probably because of incompatibilities between the activity budgets of males and females. Since most studies on behavioural differences between the sexes have been done on sexually dimorphic species, we decided to look at a system in which males and females are similar in body size. We studied time budgets, synchrony of behaviour, and bite rates of plains zebras (Equus burchelli) to evaluate the factors that enable these extremely social ungulates to stay in stable mixed-sex family groups throughout the year. As we predicted, time budgets were similar among males, lactating females, pregnant females, and non-reproductive females. Furthermore, we observed close synchronization of behaviours between females that differed in reproductive status and males. Lactating females, however, did take more bites per minute when foraging than either pregnant or non-reproducing females or males. We assume that the higher bite rates of lactating females were due to the extra costs of producing milk for their foal. We concluded that the special harem mating system, and for females the year-round possibility of conceiving, force the animals to synchronize their time budgets, which might be a major reason for the lack of difference in body size between males and females.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".