The social and genetic mating system in flickers linked to partially reversed sex roles
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The type of social and genetic mating system observed in birds is influenced by the need of both sexes to provide parental care. In woodpeckers, unlike most birds, females are partially emancipated as males provide most of the care including nocturnal incubation. We analyzed the mating system of northern flickers Colaptes auratus and used microsatellite markers to assess parentage of 326 nestlings from 46 monogamous broods and 41 nestlings from 7 polyandrous broods. No cases of extrapair paternity were found in monogamous broods, but there was one such case in the brood of a secondary male of a polyandrous female. Intraspecific parasitism lead to 17% of broods containing at least one parasitic egg. The identity of the parasitic female was determined in 5 cases to be a close neighbor with a mate and clutch of her own. Between 0% and 5% of females annually were polyandrous with the timing of the 2 nests slightly staggered. Polyandrous females were older than average females in the population, and their primary males were older than secondary males. Polyandrous females raised nearly twice as many (10.8) nestlings compared with monogamous females (5.5). Although most female flickers are strictly socially and genetically monogamous, some can benefit from engaging in the alternate reproductive tactics of polyandry and brood parasitism. Therefore, at least in flickers, such tactics of laying eggs in multiple nests are not the result of poor-quality females “making the best of a bad situation” but are a way to increase reproductive success.
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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 | 0.001 | 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".