Interspecific aggression and defence of extra nest sites in two species of songbirds
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Interspecific competition is expected when two species share resource needs. For example, secondary cavity‐nesting birds may compete vigorously for suitable nest sites both within and among species. However, little is known of whether monogamous species defend more than one nest site on their territory after breeding has begun, and in particular whether they are aggressive against other species. Defending extra nest sites may be adaptive because they may be used for renesting after a failure or to produce a second brood. We studied interactions between a monogamous, resident bird, the great tit Parus major and a migrant, the pied flycatcher Ficedula hypoleuca , providing nest boxes in woodlands in Norway. Agonistic behaviours may be subtle and easily overlooked so we experimentally placed caged male pied flycatchers near nests of great tits and at a dyad of empty nest boxes erected in the territory 25 m away. We filmed interactions between species at 21 sites in the egg‐laying period of the tit, and at 26 nest sites during incubation. Male great tits showed aggression towards the caged flycatcher both at their own nest box and at the nest boxes erected at a distance. We manipulated the external appearance of the nest boxes with painted designs around the entrances but the intensity of aggression at the empty nest boxes did not depend on whether those boxes matched the nest box with the tit nest and was not correlated with tit clutch size. Neither was the intensity of display activity at each nest box by the flycatchers that settled associated with these variables. The results are discussed in relation to hypotheses for nest site choice involving interspecific social learning and aggression.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".