Divorce in an Island Bird Population: Causes, Consequences, and Lack of Inheritance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Divorce (mate switching) is widely considered an adaptive strategy that female birds use to improve their reproductive success. However, in few species are the causes and consequences of divorce well understood, and the genetic basis and inheritance of divorce have never been explored. In Savannah sparrows (Passerculus sandwichensis) breeding on Kent Island, New Brunswick, Canada, 47.0% of pairs in which both partners survived to the following breeding season ended in divorce. Secondary females, which received less parental assistance than primary females, tended to divorce when breeding success was low or when paired with small males. Unlike young females or widows, older females improved their fledging success after divorce. Young males (but not older males) suffered lower reproductive success following a divorce. However, neither the lifetime number of divorces nor whether an individual had ever divorced affected the fitness of females or males, which suggests little or no selection for the trait. We found moderate repeatability for divorce in females (although not in males) but no additive genetic variance or evidence of maternal or paternal effects. Divorce in Savannah sparrows appears to be a nonheritable flexible behavior whose expression and consequences depend on an individual's sex, mating status, size, and age.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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".