Impacts of direct and indirect paternity cues on paternal care in a singing toadfish
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Effort spent on raising unrelated offspring can be costly and wasteful, and parents are expected to reduce their level of investment when they have low or uncertain relatedness to the young under their care. Although the relationship between parental certainty and parental investment is theoretically well established, empirical support has been mixed. Here, we report on a series of lab and field experiments that test whether paternal investment is reduced as paternity decreases in the plainfin midshipman fish ( Porichthys notatus ), a species of toadfish with male-only care. We explored what cues plainfin midshipman males use to assess their paternity. We show that a nest takeover, in which a male displaces another male from a nest, can be a reliable indirect cue of paternity information and leads to a drop in offspring survival. We also show that, when presented in isolation, direct cues of reduced offspring relatedness do not result in a decline in offspring survival in midshipman. Our findings help clarify what systems, species, and theoretical assumptions best reveal the link between parental investment and parentage.
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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".