Dominant females have brighter ornamentation in a sexually dimorphic lekking species
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Males often exhibit elaborate ornamentation that contributes to their fitness. Similarly, females can also exhibit elaborate ornamentation, but we have a relatively limited understanding of its function. Recent studies have demonstrated that female ornamentation can function in both intrasexual competition and male mate choice, but few studies have been conducted on lekking species. We therefore investigated the possibility that female ornamentation provides information about the dominance status of the bearer, which could mediate intrasexual competition. We examined this possibility using Indian peafowl ( Pavo cristatus ), a sexually dimorphic lekking species in which females exhibit elaborate ornamentation in the form of iridescent green neck plumage. We tested whether female ornamentation predicts dominance status using an information theoretic model averaging approach. We found that females with brighter ornamentation are more socially dominant than females with darker ornamentation. These results suggest that female ornamentation in this species provides social information about the dominance status of the bearer. This study provides insight into the evolution of conspicuous female traits by suggesting a potential role for female ornamentation in intrasexual competition in a lekking species.
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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".