Sexual Selection in Black Morph <i>Girardinus metallicus</i> (Pisces: Poeciliidae): Females Can Spot a Winner (But We Cannot)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Male–male competition may interfere with the ability of females to choose mates by interrupting courtship or by favoring highly aggressive males who may damage females during mating attempts. Alternatively, females may benefit by mating with dominant males, and female choice and male–male competition may therefore act in unison. The same traits, including aggressiveness, may indicate male quality to females and to rivals. We investigated sexual selection in the black morph of the endemic Cuban poeciliid fish, Girardinus metallicus , to ascertain the links between morphological and behavioral traits and success in intra‐ and intersexual selection. Males conspicuously exhibit their black ventral surface and gonopodium to females during courtship. Dichotomous choice tests revealed female association preferences for certain males, and those same males were more successful in monopolizing access to females when the fish were allowed to directly interact. Dominant males followed, courted, and copulated with females more than subordinate males within a pair, and it appears that females could either assess dominance based on cues we did not measure, or could influence subsequent mating success by their behavior during the dichotomous choice trials. There was an interaction between black status (i.e., whether the male in each pair had more or less ventral black coloration than the other male in that pair) and dominance, such that low‐black dominant males courted early and then shifted to following females, whereas high‐black dominant males courted far more later in the observation period. These results hint at the importance for sexual selection of the interplay between a static morphological trait (black coloration) and a dynamic behavioral trait (aggressiveness), but the functional significance of the courtship display remains a mystery.
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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 | 0.001 | 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".