Understanding Sex Differences in Parental Effort in a Migratory Songbird: Examining a Sex-Specific Trade-off between Reproduction and Molt
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Migratory birds are expected to experience a trade-off between reproductive effort, the timing and pace of molt, and initiation of fall migration. The purpose of this study was to investigate if males and females of a songbird that migrates to the neotropics, the Wood Thrush (Hylocichla mustelina), experience a trade-off between parental care and the timing of molt. We determined the relative contribution of males and females in feeding young, assessed how reproductive effort influenced timing of molt, and tested the prediction that the sex provisioning nestlings at the higher rate should molt later. Males fed significantly more than females throughout the breeding period, and males with higher feeding rates had greater nesting success. Males compensated for females' reduced provisioning rate at late nests, and females initiated molt earlier than males. We found a significant negative relationship between the timing of molt and the number of young fledged per season. Males that began molt earlier than females and late-molting males also increased their pace of molt. For males, the cost of reduced parental care is likely higher than the benefit of earlier molt, but delayed onset of molt is partially mitigated via a faster pace of feather growth.
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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) | 0.001 | 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 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".