The signaling function of plumage characteristics in female tree swallows and implications for reproductive success and life-history decisions.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The existence of elaborate plumages in birds has traditionally been explained as a result of mate choice by females for these traits in males. Ornate plumage traits are thought to be costly to produce and maintain, allowing females to gain accurate information about potential mates based on the expression of these traits. Female plumage traits, on the other hand, are less understood and have been rarely studied as having signaling potential. In an attempt to reduce this gap in knowledge, I investigated the potential signaling function of specific plumage characteristics in female tree swallows (Tachycineta bicolor). Tree swallows are one of only two species of North American passerines where females, rather than males, have delayed plumage maturation (DPM). Females in their second year of life (SY) display mainly brown subadult-coloured' feathers on their dorsal surface, while older (after-second year of life: ASY) females primarily have iridescent blue-green adult-coloured' feathers. There is, however, much variation in the number of adult-coloured feathers in the dorsal plumage of SY females. To date, only one study has experimentally examined the potential signaling function of DPM in female tree swallows, and no study has yet examined variation in the amount of DPM exhibited among SY females. Although plumage colour of ASY female tree swallows is less variable compared to SY females, such variation in ASY females is related to reproductive success, making both SY and ASY female plumage characteristics potentially indicative of quality. In this thesis, I investigated 1) if conspecifics behave differently towards SY and ASY females based solely on plumage colouration, indicating that DPM could signal subordinate status and inexperience during the breeding season, 2) if variability in the amount of DPM in SY female tree swallows is a condition-dependent trait and therefore possibly a target of sexual selection, and 3) whether variation in plumage traits of ASY female tree swallows is
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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) | 0.001 | 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 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".