The genetics of morphological and behavioural island traits in deer mice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Animals on islands often exhibit dramatic differences in morphology and behaviour compared to mainland individuals, a phenomenon known as the “island syndrome”. These differences are thought to be adaptations to island environments, but the extent to which they have a genetic basis or instead represent plastic responses to environmental extremes is often unknown. Here, we revisit a classic case of island syndrome in deer mice ( Peromyscus maniculatus ) from British Columbia. We first show that Saturna Island mice and those from neighbouring islands are ∼35% (∼5g) heavier than mainland mice and diverged approximately 10 thousand years ago. We then established laboratory colonies and find that Saturna Island mice are heavier both because they are longer and have disproportionately more lean mass. These trait differences are maintained in second-generation captive-born mice raised in a common environment. In addition, island-mainland hybrids reveal a maternal genetic effect on body weight. Using behavioural testing in the lab, we also find that wild-caught island mice are less aggressive than mainland mice; however, lab-raised mice born to these founders do not differ in aggression. Together, our results reveal that these mice respond differently to environmental conditions on islands – evolving both heritable changes in a morphological trait and also expressing a plastic phenotypic response in a behavioural trait.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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".