Costs of reproduction in a long-lived bird: large clutch size is associated with low survival in the presence of a highly virulent disease
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Fitness costs of reproduction are expected to be more pronounced when the environmental conditions deteriorate. We took advantage of a natural experiment to investigate the costs of reproduction among common eiders (Somateria mollissima) nesting at a site in the Arctic, where an avian cholera epizootic appeared at different magnitudes. We tested the predictions that larger reproductive effort (clutch size) is associated with lower survival or breeding probability the following year, and that this relationship was more pronounced under heightened exposure to the disease. Our results indicate that large clutch sizes were associated with lower survival of female eider ducks, but only when there was heightened exposure to avian cholera, as indexed by eider mortality on site. No cost was observed when cholera was absent or when lesser exposure was evident. This supports the hypothesis that fitness costs of high reproductive effort are higher under unfavourable conditions such as a disease epizootic, and further indicates that being a conservative breeder can increase survival probability, given the presence of a highly virulent disease.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".