Biparental care and social evolution in burying beetles: lessons from the larder
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Burying beetles (Coleoptera: Silphidae: Nicrophorus ) exhibit elaborate biparental care. Males and females independently search for small vertebrate carcasses, which serve as the sole food source for developing young. Both parents prepare the carcass for burial, excavate a cavity in the carcass within which the young feed, provision the young during the early stages of their development, and protect them from conspecific and interspecific predators and competitors. Carrion is an extremely nutrient–rich resource, but it can vary greatly in quantity and quality, and owing to its rarity and ephemeral nature, its occurrence is highly unpredictable. We propose that many of the sexual and parental behaviors of Nicrophorus can be regarded as adaptations to the unique problems posed by these resource features. Competition for carrion is intense; consequently, traits that help reduce or eliminate competition, such as carcass burial, should increase reproductive success. Competition among burying beetles is manifest in inter– and intraspecific aggressive interactions that can escalate into damaging fights. However, losers of contests over carcasses can adopt alternative reproductive tactics: subordinate females can leave some young to be cared for by a dominant female, and subordinate males can sire offspring by surreptitiously mating with the resident female. Males can also inseminate females without having found a carcass, but the number of offspring resulting from these matings is small relative to that of parental males on carcasses.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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".