Within-population song evolution in white-throated sparrows (Zonotrichia albicollis)
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Cultural evolution of birdsong occurs when songs change over generations and such changes can spread directionally or via drift within populations. We describe the emergence and directional spread of a novel song variant within a population of White-throated Sparrows in central British Columbia, Canada. Birds in this population have been singing a doublet-ending song since the early 2000s. In 2015, we detected a novel variant, consisting of a doublet-ending song with a distinctive amplitude modulation in the first note (Modulated-Doublet). We banded and recorded birds from 2015 to 2020 and classified songs using both audio and spectrographic analysis. The proportion of birds singing the Modulated-Doublet increased, replacing the Unmodulated-Doublet over time. Additionally, the modulation became more pronounced, both across the population and within individual birds, over successive years. The rapid spread suggests there may be several transmission biases driving the adoption of this novel song over the older established variant.
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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 | 0.000 | 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) | 0.000 | 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 it