What Does Carotenoid-Dependent Coloration Tell? Plasma Carotenoid Level Signals Immunocompetence and Oxidative Stress State in Birds–A Meta-Analysis
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Mechanisms maintaining honesty of sexual signals are far from resolved, limiting our understanding of sexual selection and potential important parts of physiology. Carotenoid pigmented visual signals are among the most extensively studied sexual displays, but evidence regarding hypotheses on how carotenoids ensure signal honesty is mixed. Using a phylogenetically controlled meta-analysis of 357 effect sizes across 88 different species of birds, we tested two prominent hypotheses in the field: that carotenoid-dependent coloration signals i) immunocompetence and/or ii) oxidative stress state. Separate meta-analyses were performed for the relationships of trait coloration and circulating carotenoid level with different measures of immunocompetence and oxidative stress state. For immunocompetence we find that carotenoid levels (r = 0.20) and trait color intensity (r = 0.17) are significantly positively related to PHA response. Additionally we find that carotenoids are significantly positively related to antioxidant capacity (r = 0.10), but not significantly related to oxidative damage (r = -0.02). Thus our analyses provide support for both hypotheses, in that at least for some aspects of immunity and oxidative stress state the predicted correlations were found. Furthermore, we tested for differences in effect size between experimental and observational studies; a larger effect in observational studies would indicate that co-variation might not be causal. However, we detected no significant difference, suggesting that the relationships we found are causal. The overall effect sizes we report are modest and we discuss potential factors contributing to this, including differences between species. We suggest complementary mechanisms maintaining honesty rather than the involvement of carotenoids in immune function and oxidative stress and suggest experiments on how to test these.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 it