Colour of adult avian integumentary features reveals differences related to<i>in ovo</i>stressors
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Developmental stress experienced during the embryonic period has the potential to affect individual quality and to exert long‐term impacts on avian fitness. Avian integumentary characteristics such as skin and feather colour (potential markers of red‐related carotenoid pigmentation or black‐related melanin pigmentation) can affect mate selection and reproductive investment in the wild and can act as honest signals where the level of colour expression correlates with genetic, nutritional or environmental ‘quality’ of the individual. However, little is known about whether embryonic conditions and stressors experiencedin ovopersist to affect integumentary adult feather and skin coloration. In this study, we used digital photography measures of eye‐ring and breast‐band colour, structural body size, feather corticosterone, and moult progression to assess whether temperature and contaminant stress experienced by embryos later impacts ornament expression in 1‐year‐old captive‐reared KilldeerCharadrius vociferus.Study birds had been previously exposed to polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) 126 or DMSO (control) at different incubation temperatures (36, 37.5 and 39 °C)in ovobut were subsequently hatched and reared under identical conditions. We found corticosterone levels at hatch from Killdeer tail feathers were higher in response to increased incubation temperature (but not to PCB exposure), suggesting adrenal activity was affected by temperature during the sensitivein ovoperiod. Digital photography detected individual differences in integumentary colour that covaried with temperature treatment and feather corticosterone at hatch. Birds with higher feather corticosterone levels had chromatically blacker breast‐bands as adults and exhibited signs of earlier moult, structurally shorter tarsi, and longer head bill and culmen. Birds incubated below optimal temperature had chromatically more yellow (less orange) eye‐rings. Overall, we found that digital photography revealed differences in breast‐band and eye‐ring colour and that these variations in integumentary traits can reflect persistent differences in individual size and quality resulting from early life temperature stress.
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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 | 0.000 | 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".