Fighting over food unites the birds of North America in a continental dominance hierarchy
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Members of different species often engage in aggressive contests over resources. This series of aggressive contests between species may result in an interspecific dominance hierarchy. Such hierarchies are of interest because they could be used to address a variety of research questions, for example, do similarly ranked species tend to avoid each other in time or space, and what will happen when such species come into contact as climates change? Here, we propose a method for creating a continental-scale hierarchy, and we make initial analyses based on this hierarchy. Leveraging the existing network of citizen scientists from Project FeederWatch, we collected the data with which to create a continent-spanning interspecific dominance hierarchy that included species that do not currently have overlapping geographic distributions. We quantified the extent of intransitivities (rock-paper-scissors relationships) in the hierarchy, as intransitivities can promote local species’ coexistence. Overall, the hierarchy was nearly linear, and largely predicted by body mass, although there were clade-specific deviations from the average mass–dominance relationship. Warblers and orioles, for instance, were more dominant than expected based on their body mass, while buntings, grosbeaks, and doves were less dominant than expected. Intransitive relationships were rare. Few interactions were reported between close relatives and ecological competitors like Mountain and Black-capped Chickadees, as such species often have only marginally overlapping geographic distributions, restricting opportunity for observation. Yet, these species’ ranks—emergent properties of the network—were often in agreement with targeted studies of dominance relationships between them.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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) | 0.011 | 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 it