A benthic predatory fish does not cause selection on armour traits in three-spined stickleback Gasterosteus aculeatus (Gasterosteiformes: Gasterosteidae)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Predation can promote divergence between prey populations and contribute to ecological speciation. In theory, predators can also constrain prey population divergence. In coastal British Columbia, Canada, Gasterosteus aculeatus (three-spined stickleback) species pairs only occur in lakes with a single species of predatory fish: Oncorhynchus clarkii (the cutthroat trout). Similar lakes containing additional predatory fish species (Cottus asper, prickly sculpins; Oncorhynchus mykiss, rainbow trout) contain only single species of morphologically intermediate stickleback, suggesting that these predators prevent the coexistence of stickleback species pairs. We conducted a mesocosm experiment to investigate how prickly sculpins might constrain divergence, by quantifying their impact on survival and natural selection on antipredator (armour) traits in F2 stickleback from a cross between ecologically divergent populations. We tested three hypotheses: (1) sculpin predation on sticklebacks reduces survival in a way that could result in their exclusion from certain niches; (2) sculpins compete with stickleback; (3) sculpins respond to prey vulnerabilities in similar ways to cutthroat trout, tending to constrain rather than to enhance divergence. We found that sculpins significantly reduce stickleback survival, that their presence per se does not reduce growth in stickleback, and that predation did not result in selection on any of the armour traits measured, or on gill raker length, which is an important trophic trait. These results tend to refute hypotheses (2) and (3), while supporting hypothesis (1).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| 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 | 0.000 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".