Sexual dimorphism and alternative reproductive tactics in the Midland Painted Turtle (Chrysemys(picta(marginata)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The reproductive strategy of Painted Turtles (Chrysemys picta) has been described as a \ncombination of male courtship and female mate choice. However, in situ field \nobservations from a long-term study of C. picta in Algonquin Provincial Park (Ontario, \nCanada) suggest that males also demonstrate coercive mating tactics. Males are equipped \nwith prominent tomiodonts, tooth-like cusps of the upper jaw, which seemingly function \nin restraining mates and result in wounding to the head and neck of females. I propose \nthat the tomiodonts of male C. picta serve as sexual weapons used to coerce females into \nmating. This thesis has two main objectives: 1) to describe the tomiodont morphology of \nC. picta, and 2) to test the functional significance of tomiodonts in the mating tactics of \nmale C. picta. In Chapter I, I investigate the overall cranial morphology of C. picta with \nan emphasis on sexual dimorphism of the tomiodonts. I show that male C. picta have \nsexually size dimorphic tomiodonts with an optimized arrangement for biting and \ngripping. In Chapter II, I investigate the soft tissue wounding demographics of a C. picta \npopulation as these wounds relate to antagonistic sexual interactions. Using a 24-year \ndataset on wounding I show that large females experience the highest wounding \nprobability and that elevated rates of wounding occur during the late summer breeding \nperiod. In Chapter III, I use behavioural trials during the spring and late summer \nreproductive seasons to evaluate male reproductive behaviour. I show that small males \ncourt females through titillation, whereas larger males employ coercive tactics, such as \nbiting and forced submergence. My findings are contrary to the female choice mating \nsystem reported for C. picta and join a growing body of research demonstrating the \nimportance of coercive tactics in the reproduction of male emydid turtles.
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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".