Parental role division predicts avian preen wax cycles
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Previous studies have shown that preen wax composition in some sandpipers shifts from the usual monoesters to diesters during the breeding season, possibly to reduce the ability of mammalian predators to find nests using olfactory cues. To investigate further the relationship between incubation and wax secretion, we examined seven sandpiper species with different incubation patterns (species in which both sexes incubate, in which only males incubate and in which only females incubate). During the breeding period, diester preen wax was secreted almost exclusively by the incubating sex in species with uniparental incubation, and by both sexes in species with biparental incubation. These findings suggest that diester preen waxes have a function that is directly related to incubation. Unexpectedly, in female‐incubating Curlew Sandpiper Calidris ferruginea and Buff‐breasted Sandpiper Tryngites subruficollis, some males also secreted diester preen waxes during the breeding period. This suggests that some males may in fact incubate, that these waxes may be a remnant from their evolutionary past when both sexes incubated, or that males need to be olfactorally cryptic because they are involved in the making of nest scrapes. The seasonal pattern of preen wax composition was also studied in captive male, female and female‐mimicking male (‘faeder’) Ruff Philomachus pugnax. Captive female Ruff changed preen wax composition from monoesters to diesters in the spring despite the fact that no incubation took place. This suggests that circannual rhythms rather than actual incubation behaviour may trigger the shift to diester waxes. All captive male Ruff, including the faeders, continued to secrete monoesters, supporting the hypothesis that only the incubating sex secretes diesters.
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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) | 0.003 | 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".