The Role of Sibling Competition and Parental Provisioning on Food Distribution among Ferruginous Hawk Nestlings
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Parent-offspring conflicts arise through the competing efforts of the parents (to optimize their reproductive success) and the offspring (to secure maximum resources for themselves to enhance survival). Competition among siblings in a brood plays a key role in each nestling's relative fitness, particularly in avian species that hatch asynchronously. Previously published research has shown that the first-hatched nestling secures the most food, often at an energetic cost to its siblings. However, few researchers have simultaneously investigated competition and parental allocation behaviors to determine their effects on food distribution among raptor nestlings. We found that Ferruginous Hawk (Buteo regalis) parents delivered the same number of prey to nests, regardless of brood size. Contrary to our expectations, all nestlings consumed a similar amount of food within individual feeding events. Importantly, neither nestling competition nor parental allocation was the dominant process responsible for equal food distribution. Instead, the first-hatched and second-hatched nestling gained more food by competition, and the third-hatched nestling gained more food through parental allocation. Although each nestling attempted to optimize its food consumption relative to its siblings, resulting in unequal competitive outcomes, parents altered their allocation behavior to offset sibling competition. Ultimately parents provided the last-hatched nestling with more food, and thereby controlled food distribution to maximize their reproductive output. Future work should explore the role of nestling competition and parental allocation on food distribution using supplementation at nests when prey abundance in the environment is low.
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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 | 0.001 | 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) | 0.000 | 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".