Extra-pair paternity drives plumage colour elaboration in male passerines
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The elaborate ornamental plumage displayed by birds has largely been attributed to sexual selection, whereby the greater success of ornamented males in attaining mates drives a rapid elaboration of those ornaments. Indeed, plumage elaboration tends to be greatest in species with a high variance in reproductive success such as polygynous mating systems. Even among socially monogamous species, many males are extremely colourful. In their now-classic study, Møller and Birkhead (1994) suggested that increased variance in reproductive success afforded by extra-pair paternity should intensify sexual selection pressure and thus an elaboration of male plumage and sexual dichromatism, but the relatively few measures of extra-pair paternity at the time prevented a rigorous test of this hypothesis. In the nearly three decades since that paper's publication, hundreds of studies have been published on rates of extra-pair paternity and more objective measures of plumage colouration have been developed, allowing for a large-scale comparative test of Møller and Birkhead's (1994) hypothesis. Using an analysis of 186 socially monogamous passerine species with estimates of extra-pair paternity, our phylogenetically controlled analysis confirms Møller and Birkhead's (1994) early work, demonstrating that rates of extra-pair paternity are positively associated with male, but not female, colouration and with the extent of sexual dichromatism. Plumage evolution is complex and multifaceted, driven by phylogenetic, ecological, and social factors, but our analysis confirms a key role of extra-pair mate choice in driving the evolution of ornamental traits.
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 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".