The content of reindeer male vocalisations: acoustic cues to age and size
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Some acoustic parameters of animal vocalisations have been shown to reliably indicate male quality and play a role in mate and rival assessment. Reindeer possess a peculiar vocal tract anatomy involving a laryngeal air sac which probably acts as an additional filter, making it a candidate species for novel investigations in the field of bioacoustics. We investigated whether some acoustic parameters of male rutting vocalisations were good indicators of age and body weight (used as an index for body size). We did this by performing acoustic analyses using recordings collected from a semi-domesticated reindeer population in northern Finland. We found the age of subadult males (aged 2.5–4.5 years) to be negatively correlated with formant F3 and formant spacing, suggesting that their vocalisations convey information on the caller’s age. Individual formant frequencies were not affected by male body weight, but formant spacing was lower in heavier males. Despite the presence of the laryngeal air sac, formant spacing seems to be an acoustic parameter influencing mate and rival assessment in reindeer as it gives an honest indication of male body size. We discuss the importance of reliable acoustic cues to quality indices in sexual selection contexts.
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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