Consequences of Egg Size for Offspring Survival: A Cross-Fostering Experiment in Ruddy Ducks (Oxyura Jamaicensis)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In birds, large egg size often enhances subsequent offspring survival, but most previous studies have been unable to separate effects of egg size from other maternal influences. Therefore, we first evaluated variance components of egg size both within and among individual female Ruddy Ducks (Oxyura jamaicensis), and then tested for egg-size-dependent survival of ducklings in the wild by switching complete broods among females. Forty broods consisting of 244 individually color-marked, day-old ducklings of known egg size were given to foster mothers, and survival was monitored to one month. Analysis of mark–resighting data showed that offspring survival was best modeled to include effects of egg size and hatching date; survival probability increased with egg size, but declined with advancing hatching date. Duckling body mass, body size, and body condition measured at hatching were positively correlated with egg size. Unlike most other duck species, and for reasons that are speculative, egg sizes varied within clutches nearly as much as they did among clutches. Selective mortality of small egg phenotypes during the first weeks after hatching likely is the result of smaller duckling size and reduced energy reserves, characteristics that must be particularly unfavorable in adverse environments.
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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) | 0.001 | 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".