Male validation factor for three-spined stickleback (<i>Gasterosteus aculeatus</i>) mate choice likely evolutionarily conserved since 50 thousand years
Bibliographic record
Abstract
During mate choice, three-spined stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus) females make use of male olfactory cues to determine the suitability of potential mates in a species- and habitat-dependent manner. This signal contains peptides reflecting the individual male’s MHC profile and a so-called male validation factor (MVF) indicating the species identity of the sender. In a two-armed flow channel, we exposed gravid females to male odour. The odours from males that produced only the MVF but no MHC signal yet were used to examine whether the MVF of distant stickleback populations, one from Canada and one from Germany – genetically isolated since approximately 31–59 thousand years – has changed to such a degree that present-day females only react to the MVF produced by males from their population of origin. The fish used in the experiments were bred from in vitro-fertilized eggs in either country; those from Canada were shipped for analysis to the Plön laboratory to minimize experimental variability. Given the choice between the two MVFs, females did not significantly prefer the MVF of males of their own origin over the other. However, compared to water, both types of females preferred their own MVF significantly and the foreign MVF almost significantly, respectively, suggesting that they could smell MVFs from both origins. These results suggest that, despite long-term genetic isolation between Canadian and German populations, the three-spined stickleback male validation factor has remained constant and thus represents an evolutionarily conserved signal.
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.
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 | 0.001 |
| 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) | 0.003 | 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".