Plumage color as a dynamic trait: carotenoid pigmentation of male house finches (<i>Carpodacus mexicanus</i>) fades during the breeding season
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Evolutionary biologists studying sexually selected bird plumage generally consider this trait to be static throughout a breeding season and assign trait values to individuals on the basis of single measurements. We investigated the propensity for carotenoid-based color of feather patches in male house finches (Carpodacus mexicanus ( Muller, 1776)) to change during the breeding period. We recaptured and rescored 63 males and found that the hue of feathers faded significantly over the season. The degree of hue change was a direct function of the amount of time between plumage scores; feathers faded more as the interval between measurements increased. The magnitude of hue change was not, however, related to an individual's age or initial plumage redness, which suggests that certain birds are not more or less prone to fading. Collectively, these findings imply that researchers should more carefully track plumage color expression during the course of a year, as seasonal color shifts may have important consequences for late-season male–male competitive interactions and flexible female mating tactics (e.g., social mate switching, choice of extra-pair partners). Potential mechanisms for this seasonal plumage color shift are discussed.
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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".