Variation in female songbird state determines signal strength needed to evoke copulation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Female preferences for male signals largely determine courtship success. In most songbirds, females control reproduction via the copulation solicitation display (CSD), an innate, stereotyped posture produced in direct response to male displays. In some species, CSD can be elicited under controlled experimental conditions, allowing CSD production to be used as a bioassay for the underlying mechanics of courtship, however historically our ability to measure variability in CSD was limited. Using computer vision approaches to precisely quantify the trajectory of CSD in female brown-headed cowbirds ( Molothrus ater ), we show that song potency (how often a song elicits CSD) and female responsivity (how likely a female is to produce CSD) each predict whether a female produces CSD in response to a given presentation. Within elicited CSD, potency and responsivity also predict the duration and onset latency of the displays. By modeling and testing two alternative hypotheses of preference formation, we show that changes in response rates are consistent with a shifting receiver response threshold, suggesting that the song quality required to evoke the copulatory posture in a particular female will vary over time. These results establish a novel framework for exploring CSD and emphasize the importance of the internal state of receivers in determining behavioral responses and suggest that female responsivity acts in conjunction with male signal strength to determine the efficacy of male courtship signaling.
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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 | 0.000 | 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) | 0.002 | 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 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".