Insect homolog of oxytocin/vasopressin associated with parenting of males but not females in a subsocial beetle
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Parental care is thought to evolve through modification of behavioral precursors, which predicts that mechanistic changes occur in the genes underlying those traits. The duplicated gene system of oxytocin/vasopressin has been broadly co-opted across vertebrates to influence parenting, from a preduplication ancestral role in water balance. It remains unclear whether co-option of these genes for parenting is limited to vertebrates. Here, we experimentally tested for associations between inotocin gene expression and water balance, parental acceptance of offspring, and active parenting in the subsocial beetle Nicrophorus orbicollis, to test whether this single-copy homolog of the oxytocin/vasopressin system has similarly been co-opted for parental care in a species with elaborate parenting. As expected, inotocin was associated with water balance in both sexes. Inotocin expression increased around sexual maturation in both males and females, although more clearly in males. Finally, inotocin expression was not associated with acceptance of larvae, but was associated with a transition to male but not female parenting. Moreover, level of offspring provisioning behavior and gene expression were positively correlated in males but uncorrelated in females. Our results suggest a broad co-option of this system for parenting that may have existed prior to gene duplication.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".