Diet explains red flight feathers in Yellow-shafted Flickers in eastern North America
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Yellow-shafted Flickers (Colaptes auratus auratus subspecies group of the Northern Flicker) occasionally have orange to red flight feathers in eastern North America far from the hybrid zone with the Red-shafted Flicker (C. a. cafer subspecies group). Blocks of feathers of anomalous color tend to show bilateral symmetry and may differ from one year to the next in the same bird. It has been suggested that hybridization with cafer must be the source of the red color and that selection for that color could explain the high incidence of red or orange shafts in eastern flickers in some localities. Complex, though largely unproven, physiological mechanisms have been hypothesized to explain the variegated look. We evaluated a simpler, dietary explanation for the variation: that the pigment rhodoxanthin acquired exogenously at the time of feather molt comes to rest alongside the carotenoids normally present in these feathers. An exogenous source of rhodoxanthin exists in the berries of nonnative bush honeysuckles (Lonicera spp.) now naturalized in eastern North America and the American Midwest. We confirm the presence of rhodoxanthin and a probable metabolite, rather than the 4-keto-carotenoids found in the Red-shafted Flicker, in the red flight feathers of 2 Yellow-shafted Flickers from eastern North America. In these individuals, dietary rhodoxanthin appeared to interfere with the production of lutein, the main carotenoid in auratus. A fairly abrupt appearance of red color in earlier-molted primaries (usually p4 or p5) followed by its gradual fading in subsequent primaries in a large series of aberrantly colored flickers from eastern North America and the American Midwest supports a dietary explanation. We use data on the timing of replacement of primaries in the Northern Flicker at Manomet in Plymouth, eastern Massachusetts, to infer that these aberrantly colored Yellow-shafted Flickers on average acquired the unusual red pigment in early August.
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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".