Have Winter Spacing Patterns of Harlequin Ducks Been Partially Shaped by Sexual Selection?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sexual selection can operate throughout the annual cycle and likely shapes the winter plumage and courtship displays of many northern waterfowl that choose mates during winter. Less conspicuous effects of sexual selection are likely and in this study I asked whether winter distribution patterns and grouping behavior of Harlequin Ducks (Histrionicus histrionicus) are partially shaped by sexual selection. Harlequin Ducks are typically dispersed in small groups and observed grouping behavior supported the hypothesis that unpaired adult and immature birds will show sexually-selected changes in their spacing to facilitate courtship and mate sampling. Unpaired birds occurred in larger groups than paired birds during October-February, and group-related differences in the sex ratio and in the proportion of females that were unpaired indicated that unpaired birds were aggregating specifically for courtship. Behavior similar to lekking was observed at one site. Males gathered at this site at daybreak, unpaired females visited the site each apparently to attract a group of courting males, and these courting groups left the site without feeding. When herring spawn was available in March, unpaired birds were more likely to move to exploit it and gained both direct nutritional benefits as well as indirect benefits related to changes in time budgets and spacing behavior that facilitated courtship and mate sampling. Overall, results suggest that sexually-selected behaviors that affect the process of mate choice and the timing of pairing are important to consider if we are trying to explain winter spacing patterns of waterfowl.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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) | 0.001 | 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".