Effects of foraging and sexual selection on ecomorphology of a fish with alternative reproductive tactics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The foraging ecology of fish is often considered to be the primary determinant of body shape due to tight links between morphology, swimming performance, and foraging efficiency. Fish foraging on littoral benthic macroinvertebrates typically have a deeper body shape than those foraging on pelagic zooplankton in the water column. However, morphological traits often have multiple ecological functions, which could result in performance trade-offs between functions. Here, we provide the first examination of body shape and diet in a species with alternative reproductive tactics, in this case, bluegill sunfish (Lepomis macrochirus Rafinesque, 1819). Bluegill males mature into either “parental” or “cuckolder” reproductive tactics. Parentals build nests and provide sole parental care and defense of the young. Cuckolders instead act as “sneakers” darting into the nests of parental males while mating is occurring and then later in life become “satellites,” mimicking female appearance and behavior. Using stable carbon and nitrogen isotopic analysis of diet, we found that parentals and females consumed primarily pelagic zooplankton yet were the deepest in body shape. Sneakers consumed more littoral resources but were the most streamlined. Satellite males also consumed predominately littoral resources but had a deeper body form that was more similar to females than to size-matched juveniles. Our results differ from past studies of foraging ecomorphology and suggest that other selection pressures, such as sexual selection in species with alternative reproductive tactics, may also be an important factor influencing shape.
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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".