Early nutritional stress and iridescent structural colour production in adult European Starlings, Sturnus vulgaris: does early stress aversely influence plumage colouration?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Within avian taxa, plumage ornamentation traits have been widely used to study sexual selection, as many of these traits have been shown to honestly reveal individual health and influence mate choice. The majority of previous studies have focused on carotenoid-based pigments. Recently, there has been an increasing shift towards understanding the role of structural colours, which produce green, blue, violet, and iridescent colours from the nanostructural arrangement of feather barbules rather than pigments. Our study explores how early nutritional stress affects iridescent structural colour production in European Starlings, Sturnus vulgaris. We hypothesize that nestlings living in stressful environments will display a reduction in plumage brightness in later adulthood compared to those that have unlimited access to resources, as iridescent colouration appears to be a condition-dependent trait in this and other species. We analyzed the breast, throat, back, and tail feathers of European Starlings that were hand raised at the Advanced Facility for Avian Research (AFAR) at Western University, Ontario. Nestlings in the experimental group were raised on a restricted diet for the first 18 days, followed by random access to food for 18-100 days, while control birds had access to ad libitum throughout the study. After 100 days, a few feathers from each body region were collected and analyzed using reflectance spectrometry to determine whether there is a significant association between plumage colouration and nutritional condition. If our data reveal an association between early nutritional stress and adult plumage colouration, our results will support the condition-dependence of structural colours as well as the long-lasting consequences of early nutritional stress. Moreover, with continued habitat destruction and climate change, researchers need to understand how animals will respond to an increasing frequency of stressful events. Structural colours may become important non-invasive bioindicators of environmental stress.
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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".