Male social plasticity influences transient dynamics in the emergence of alternative mating systems in water striders
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Animal mating systems are often studied with the goal of understanding why species, populations, or groups vary from one another in the system they display. Although these differences are often treated as basically stable, it is also known that mating systems may shift over time (e.g., from one breeding season to the next). There has been some study of how ecological factors correlate with these changes; however, few, if any, studies have investigated how the phenotypic composition of a group governs the timing and probability of these mating system transitions. Groups of stream water striders (Aquarius remigis) can experience rapid changes in mating system dynamics, with small groups often transitioning into a system in which a single, large male monopolizes mating opportunities. We asked if variation in individual- and group-level traits associated with morphology and behavior (e.g., size of the largest individual, average activity behavioral type in the group) could partially explain the variability in how rapidly groups make this transition, if they make it at all. We show that groups with males that exhibit higher social plasticity tended to take longer to transition to a mating system dominated by a single male. Our results, therefore, suggest that groups in identical ecological conditions can diverge in their mating systems based on how much individuals in the group change their behavior in response to the behavior of other members of the group.
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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) | 0.000 | 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".