Climate fluctuations interact with local demography and resources to predict spatially dynamic adult sex ratios in a megaherbivore
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Adult sex ratio (ASR) is a fundamental concept in population and evolutionary biology, with implications for management and conservation. Although ASR is typically measured at the population‐level, local mate competition points toward spatial variation in ASR within populations, the causes of which remain unclear. Over five breeding seasons (2008–2012), we tracked the life histories and movements of all male and female feral horses known to be alive (n = 721) on Sable Island, Canada, to investigate determinants of spatially explicit ASRs. We show that local demographic traits (density, adult female abundance, and abundance of unpaired males (e.g. floaters, adult bachelors)) operate together with inter‐annual changes in weather to determine asymmetrical ASRs across time and space that deviate from the population‐level mean. While accounting for possible confounding effects of unpaired male movements and weather, we also show that local demographics are best explained by different responses to an environmental gradient (distance to surface water). Our results demonstrate that local demographic traits operate as mechanisms by which environmental gradients and weather can shape spatial variation in ASR within wild populations, which has important implications for predicting how opportunities for sexual selection may follow from changes in resource availability and climate.
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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".