Altered physical and social conditions produce rapidly reversible mating systems in water striders
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Mating systems can vary within-species but the environmental drivers and behavioral mechanisms underlying this variation are seldom investigated experimentally. We experimentally assessed how individual behavioral plasticity in response to changes in pool and group size resulted in fundamental shifts in mating systems in water striders. We observed the same animals in larger and smaller pools, mimicking variation in pool size in natural streams, and observed a rapid, reversible change in the entire mating system. In large pools, striders exhibited scramble promiscuity with intense sexual conflict. Most males were active, harassing and driving females into hiding. Matings were frequent and typically lasted for more than 100 min. In contrast, when placed in small pools, the same animals often exhibited harem polygyny where the largest male drove other males into hiding, but allowed females to be relatively active. Matings were less frequent and of much shorter duration. Harem polygyny took several days to emerge after animals were moved to small pools, while these same animals returned to scramble promiscuity within hours after being moved to larger pools. Such variability in mating systems likely has important implications for the evolution of individual mating tactics.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 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".