In Vitro Fertilization Reveals Offspring Recognition via Self‐Referencing in a Fish with Paternal Care and Cuckoldry
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Male bluegill sunfish ( Lepomis macrochirus ) exhibit alternative life histories: some males (parentals) delay maturation for up to 7 yr, then build nests, court females, and care for the eggs and fry, whereas other males (cuckolders) mature precociously, attempt to steal fertilizations from parentals, and provide no parental care. Parental males could avoid misdirecting their nepotism (i.e. caring for unrelated young) by abandoning entire broods if they were sired mainly by cuckolders or by discriminating between offspring and non‐kin fry within broods for which they care. We tested for kin discrimination by obtaining sperm from parental and cuckolder males and eggs from several females, and using them to conceive fry in vitro. In ‘blind’ laboratory tests, parental males (but not cuckolder males) distinguished between sources of dripping water that had been conditioned by their own offspring vs. unrelated fry. Parental males that were in the best physical condition were especially choosy. Because the only referents available to our experimental subjects were chemical cues emanating from their own body, our results imply that parental males can use self‐referent phenotype matching for kin recognition. This mechanism enables males to make the adaptive, nepotistic adjustments in paternal care that have been documented in previous studies.
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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) | 0.000 | 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".