Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cryptic female choice is the ability of a polyandrous mating female to favour - or hinder - the sperm of a particular male from fertilizing her ova, under sperm competition. It operates under varied mechanisms and occurs in both internal and external fertilizers. In fishes, a key process is driven by the effect of ovarian fluid - the fluid released with the ova at spawning - on the swimming characteristics of sperm. Due to the limited functioning life-span of fish gametes, researchers have previously had to use fresh ovarian fluid and sperm, thus limiting the geographical and temporal range of their studies, or freeze one, or the other, or both. Much work has been done on the cryo-preservation of fish sperm; however, it was unclear - until now - whether the freezing of ovarian fluid affects its sperm-influencing properties. This is where Craig Purchase and Anna Rooke of Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada come in (Purchase & Rooke, 2020). They took ovarian fluid and semen from three species of salmonids - lake tout, brown trout and Atlantic salmon - and tested both frozen and fresh ovarian fluid on the swimming characteristics of sperm. They found quite clearly that freezing did not reduce the effect of ovarian fluid on the motility, swimming speed or linearity of conspecific sperm. This is good news for researchers; it allows them to build up collections of ovarian fluids from different females - the “spice-rack” of the title - in the knowledge that freezing them will not alter the very properties that they are investigating. Now, studies can include different populations, even different years, to investigate how ovarian fluids influence the sperm of different males, and thus the extent and importance of this effect in reproductive isolation, for example. It will also help in the ultimate identification of the proximate factor(s) involved, but this is still some way ahead.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.443 | 0.421 |
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".