Variation in offspring development is driven more by weather and maternal condition than predation risk
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Variation in offspring development is expected to be driven by constraints on resource allocation between growth and maintenance (e.g. thermoregulation). Rapid post‐natal development decreases predation risk to offspring, while inclement weather likely prolongs development. For taxa with parental care, parental behaviour may partially buffer offspring against extrinsic drivers like predation risk and severe weather. Using a 7‐year dataset from an alpine population of horned lark Eremophila alpestris , a ground‐nesting songbird in northern British Columbia, Canada, we investigated multiple potential drivers of variation in the duration of incubation and nestling development. Using path analysis, we evaluated the direct effects of weather, predation risk and parental care on offspring development, as well as indirect developmental “carry‐over” effects of conditions during incubation on the nestling period. Nestling period duration varied by nearly 100% (7–13 days) and incubation duration by 40% (10–14 days). Cold ambient temperatures late in the nestling period prolonged development by 1 day for every 2 days below 10°C, particularly when combined with heavy precipitation. Rapid nestling development was associated with high predation risk, and prolonging development incurred a nest survival cost (–2.3% per day). Females in good condition created nest environments that promoted rapid nestling development periods (average = 8–9 days) compared to poor condition females during harsh, early‐season conditions (10–11 days), indicating parental buffering capabilities against environmental constraints. Fledging age was weakly correlated with incubation duration ( r = –0.21) suggesting minimal developmental carry‐over effects. Given high nest predation risk, immediate fitness benefits can be derived by overcoming environmental constraints and reducing development time. While predation risk was influential, inclement weather and maternal condition had stronger effects on variation in offspring development. Addressing multiple drivers of variation in key life‐history traits can provide important context for understanding life‐history theory under changing environmental conditions. A plain language summary is available for this article.
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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) | 0.018 | 0.001 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".