Concurrent effects of sperm competition and female quality on male mate choice in the Trinidadian guppy (Poecilia reticulata)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Males are generally expected to be discriminating in their choice of mates when females vary in quality and when under sperm competition from rival males. However, how sperm competition and female quality interact to influence male mating decisions remains poorly understood. Here, we explored the concurrent effects of sperm competition and female body length on male mating decisions in the Trinidadian guppy (Poecilia reticulata) as a model system. We used female body length as a proxy for fecundity and manipulated the relative size difference of paired stimulus females concurrently with sociosexual cues (i.e., presence of rival males) that may predict sperm competition. When all else was equal, males preferred the larger female when the paired females differed considerably in body length. The presence of either 1 or 2 rival males near, and sexually interacting with, the initially preferred female reduced a focal male's preference for that female and increased the probability that he would reverse his initial mate preference. However, focal males were more likely to reverse their initial preference when the females were similar in body length than when they differed considerably in body length after observing initially preferred females interacting with 1 rival male. Our novel results suggest that male guppies simultaneously evaluate sperm competition and female quality when making mating decisions.
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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".