Sexual selection in a tropical toad: Do female toads choose brighter males in a species with rapid colour change?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Conspicuous visual signals play an important role in animal communication, both within and between species. Bright, colourful signals allow animals to discriminate between individuals and can inform behavioural decisions and social interactions. In many instances, conspicuous colouration appears to have evolved through sexual selection via female mate choice or male–male competition. Male Neotropical yellow toads, Incilius luetkenii , display bright‐yellow colouration during their brief explosive mating events and then revert to a cryptic, female‐like, brown colour following amplexus and fertilization. Recent research has revealed that the yellow colouration of males may serve as a sex identification signal and that males remain yellow in the presence of both males and females but darken without conspecific stimulus. However, there is considerable variation in the brightness of yellow colouration in courting males, ranging from dull olive‐green to vibrant lemon‐yellow. The function of this variation remains unknown. In this study, we conducted two‐choice model presentation trials to test one mechanism of sexual selection that may drive this variation: intersexual selection. Specifically, we set out to determine whether females differentiate between males based on their colouration. We presented females with two hyper‐realistic robotic model toads, with one model painted to match a bright‐yellow male and the other a dull‐yellow male. Using several metrics of choice, we found that females did not show a preference for bright or dull colouration. Our research suggests that variation in the intensity of male breeding colouration is not driven by female choice in this species. Our study is consistent with the idea that there may be limited opportunity for female choice to influence male‐trait expression in explosive breeders. Future research will address whether intrasexual selection may influence colour variation in male yellow toads.
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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) | 0.001 | 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".