Brood parasites may use gape size constraints to exploit provisioning rules of smaller hosts: an experimental test of mechanisms of food allocation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We investigated whether a mechanism of gape size limitation could increase the competitive ability of a large brood parasite in a brood of smaller host nestlings. The gape size of hatchling birds may limit the size of prey they can swallow and hence parents should bring larger more profitable prey as their nestlings grow. The relatively large gape of a brood parasite in a brood of smaller hosts may 1) increase provisioning rate to the brood, 2) allow the parasite to swallow large prey, or 3) cause parents to start bringing larger prey at an earlier nestling stage. We added 1 large same-aged great tit Parus major nestling to broods of smaller blue tits Cyanistes caeruleus to simulate a naive brood parasite system and filmed them when 2–3 days old. The cue of a single large nestling did not cause parents to increase provisioning rates nor to change the species of prey, but prey items were larger than in control broods. Large prey were “tested” more often than small prey, that is offered and then removed from the gapes of small nestlings, and 17% of the prey that the great tit nestling received had been previously offered to a blue tit. Our results revealed that prey size brought by parents could further increase the competitive ability of brood parasites.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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".