INVESTMENT IN NEST DEFENSE BY NORTHERN FLICKERS: EFFECTS OF AGE AND SEX
Bibliographic record
Abstract
At early breeding stages, male woodpeckers invest heavily in nest construction and defense, but parental contributions to brood defense among Picidae are not well known. We studied the Northern Flicker (Colaptes auratus) to determine whether sex, age, brood size, body size, or body condition influenced defense behavior. When presented with a model predator (red squirrel, Tamiasciurus hudsonicus) during the brood-rearing period, parents exhibited a range of behaviors, such as blocking the nest hole, diving at the model, and striking the model; however, defense scores did not differ between males and females aged 1, 2, or 3 years old. Although we predicted that defense level would be positively correlated with brood size, we found no such relationship. Adult body size and condition also were not related to defense intensity. We conclude that the sexes may exhibit similar levels of defense because they have similar apparent annual survival rates and males are only slightly larger than females. If flickers optimize clutch size according to the number of offspring they can rear, then there may be no relationship between defense and brood size.
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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".