Bill color is dynamic across the breeding season but not condition‐dependent in Atlantic puffins
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Sexually monomorphic species have been historically overlooked in the sexual/social selection literature, but there is growing evidence that mutual ornamentation can be driven by selective forces such as mutual sexual selection or selection for individual recognition. Examining the properties of a trait may elucidate which forces most likely play a role, especially when comparing the characteristics of quality and identity traits. Atlantic puffins ( Fratercula arctica ) are an example of a mutually ornamented monomorphic species, where both males and females display a bright orange‐red bill and orange gape rosette during the breeding season and are ornamented to similar degrees. In this study, we investigate whether the properties of the colorful bill and rosette, specifically lability across the breeding season and condition‐dependence, more closely align with signals of quality or identity. Our findings support prior work that the bill is sexually monochromatic from an avian visual perspective. We also determined that the bill changes in a discriminable way within individuals across the breeding season and is especially dynamic in the fleshy rosette. However, no metric of color on any region of the bill or rosette was significantly related to current body condition. Ultimately, we argue that bill color could potentially function as a quality signal, although further study is needed to determine which aspect of quality coloration signals, if not condition. These results provide a basis for experimentally evaluating the signal value of the colorful bill in Atlantic puffins (e.g., color manipulation experiments), and more broadly, a framework for investigating the properties of mutual ornamentation in avian species.
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 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) | 0.000 | 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".