Patterns of parent-absent begging in nestling European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Parent-offspring communication mediates feeding rates through begging by nestlings, which is energetically expensive and may alert predators to the nest's location, but benefits the nestlings by increasing body condition.Parent-absent begging is a behaviour that has the same risks as parentpresent begging, but lacks the immediate benefits.This behaviour is prevalent in many passerine bird species, including European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris).During the European starling's annual breeding season (May-July) I recorded nestling begging vocalizations at 18 broods located on the campus of Saint Mary's University, Halifax, N.S., Canada, to examine parent-absent begging.Nestling vocalizations were recorded on days two, seven, 12, 17 and the day before fledging to monitor changes over the nestling period.I predicted that parent-absent begging would increase in European starling nestlings throughout the nestling period, because multiple studies on cavity-nesting species have found that parent-absent begging increases with age.Recordings were analyzed using Syrinx sound analysis software examining the first seven parent-absent intervals occuring after 10:00 am.It was found that there were significant differences in percentage of time spent begging in the absence of parents across the nestling period with it increasing from Days two to Day 17 followed by a decrease in parent-absent begging on the day before fledging.When examining the earlier and later broods separately there were no significant differences found.This study has implications in understanding avian behaviour and will provide insight to the nature of begging, and should guide future studies on European starlings and parent-offspring communication and Saint Mary's University.
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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 | 0.001 | 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".