Conspecifics Influence the Settlement Decisions of Male Brewer's Sparrows at the Northern Edge of Their Range
Bibliographic record
Abstract
At the northern periphery of its range Brewer's Sparrow (Spizella breweri breweri) is in decline and breeds in small clusters within larger areas of suitable habitat. Clustered breeding that is unrelated to the distribution of resources may be explained by social attraction (conspecific cueing). We used a song-playback experiment to test the conspecific-cueing hypothesis in this species. The experiment was conducted during the spring settlement period in habitat that appeared physically suitable for breeding but had not been occupied during die previous two breeding seasons. Treatments were split between two periods that reflected peak settlement of experienced and first-time breeders. In both periods, more Brewer's Sparrows visited and established territories in treatment plots than in untreated control plots. There were not, however, more treatment than control plots containing breeding pairs. This difference could mean that males attracted to playbacks are of lower quality than males in established breeding clusters and thus less attractive to females, that females settle only in groups of males larger than some threshold, or that females' site fidelity is higher than that of males. These results lend support to the conspecific-cueing hypothesis in this species, indicating that social attraction may play a role in Brewer's Sparrow's habitat selection. They also suggest that traditional habitat models, which consider only resource distributions and not social factors, may be inadequate tools for the conservation of this and other species.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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; 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".