Multiple achromatic plumage ornaments signal to multiple receivers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We investigated whether achromatic plumage traits can act as multiple ornaments in an Arctic-breeding passerine, the snow bunting (Plectrophenax nivalis). Specifically, we examine whether multiple ornaments are providing multiple differing messages, are redundant, are unreliable signals of male quality, or are aimed at different receivers. We measured plumage reflectance and pigmentation patterns made conspicuous during male inter- and intrasexual displays that advertise different plumage regions. Our results indicate that although several aspects of male plumage may have redundant messages, different body regions appear aimed at different receivers. The wings of males—displayed primarily toward females during courtship—appear to indicate a pair’s future reproductive performance. Conversely, melanin-based plumage reflectance displayed during intrasexual threat displays provides information on territory features and a male’s capacity to defend it (i.e., territory size, territory quality, testosterone levels). Taken together, we suggest that snow buntings have multiple ornaments that provide information of differential importance in inter- versus intrasexual communication. This study demonstrates that achromatic plumage traits can serve in complex communication.
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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) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".