A bare-part ornament is a stronger predictor of dominance than plumage ornamentation in the cooperatively breeding Australian Swamphen
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many animals use coloration to signal dominance and fighting ability. In birds, plumage coloration is often linked to individual quality, but less research has investigated coloration in unfeathered traits (i.e. 'bare parts'), despite theoretical expectations that they might be more reliable signals. Here, we investigate the relationship between multiple ornaments and social dominance in a wild population of the cooperatively breeding Australian Swamphen (known locally as and hereafter referred to as P keko; Porphyrio melanotus melanotus) to test the hypothesis that barepart ornaments should be more strongly correlated with dominance than plumage coloration. We show that the size and color of the p keko's frontal shield (a bare-part ornament), as well as the brightness and chroma of the blue-UV breast plumage, are correlated with social dominance in adult birds. However, the correlation between frontal shield size and dominance was much higher than that between plumage color and dominance, and was also higher than most previously published correlations between plumage traits and dominance. Additionally, frontal shield size, but not breast coloration, was correlated with the size of the testes in male p kekos, which may be because bare-part ornaments are more closely tied to an individual's current physiology than plumage ornaments. While correlative, our results demonstrate that bare-part and plumage traits could act as redundant ornaments, but with differing reliability, and suggest that future studies on bare-part ornaments will enhance our understanding of dominance signaling.
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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".