Did Blue Eggs of Black-billed (Coccyzus erythropthalmus) and Yellow-billed (C. americanus) Cuckoos Evolve to Counter Host Discrimination?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Hughes (1997) hypothesized that the blue coloration of Black-billed (Coccyzus erythropthalmus) and Yellow-billed (C. americanus) cuckoo eggs evolved in response to egg discrimination by their hosts. From that hypothesis, we predicted that cuckoo hosts would eject ancestral nonmimetic (white) eggs, but be more likely to accept mimetic (blue) eggs. American Robins (Turdus migratorius) and Gray Catbirds (Dumetella carolinensis) were used to test that hypothesis because they are ejecter species that lay blue eggs and have been parasitized by Coccyzus cuckoos. Hughes' egg-mimicry hypothesis was not supported because robins and catbirds did not significantly eject white cuckoo eggs more frequently than blue cuckoo eggs. Indeed, most robins accepted both egg types. Furthermore, the observational evidence for egg mimicry is not convincing because only 5 of the 15 host species that Hughes (1997) described as having eggs that “fully or nearly match” the egg color of Black-billed and Yellow-billed cuckoos actually do so.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 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".