Condition-dependent mate assessment and choice by peahens: implications for sexual selection
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Condition-dependent mate choice is thought to affect the strength and direction of sexual selection. Although there is ample evidence of this from studies that experimentally manipulate female condition, few studies to date have examined condition dependence of natural mate choice wherein females interact with a pool of available males. We examined mate assessment by free-living Pavo cristatus peafowl, focusing on 3 measures of the choosing female’s condition: mass condition (scaled mass index), ectoparasite load, and white blood cell (WBC) count. Females with greater mass condition were more active on peacock leks, approaching and visiting males more often, and spending more time near the males they visited. Condition did not affect the total number of males visited or the probability that a female would visit a male that she had already approached. Peacock mating success is strongly correlated with the iridescent colors of the eyespots on their train, suggesting that color signals are a major focus of female choice. Here, we show that females in better condition (higher mass condition and lower WBC count) allocate a greater proportion of their visit time to the most iridescent males displaying on leks. Our results provide evidence of strong condition-dependent effects on female mate assessment and choice in the absence of experimentally induced stress. We suggest that condition-dependent mate choice may help maintain variation in sexually selected male color traits.
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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) | 0.000 | 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 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".