Male–Male Competition in a Toad With Dynamic Sexual Dichromatism: Males React Similarly to Robotic Models That Vary in Color
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Elaborate visual signals play a crucial role in communication between many breeding animals, often evolving through female mate choice and male–male competition. Neotropical Yellow Toads (Incilius luetkenii) exhibit a temporary elaborate visual trait during their brief annual mating events, transitioning from a drab, female-like brown coloration to a vibrant lemon-yellow. They engage in scramble competition, where males physically compete with both lone and amplectant males for access to females. Previous studies suggest that male color may serve as a sex identification signal in the toads' large breeding aggregations, and that females do not appear to choose males based on color. In this study we investigated whether variation in male coloration functions as an intrasexual signal during male–male interactions. Using realistic robotic model toads in a two-choice arena, we addressed two questions. First, do male Yellow Toads respond differently to a lone male versus a male in amplexus with a female when both males are the same color? Secondly, do male Yellow Toads respond differently to two amplectant males varying in the brightness of their yellow coloration? Males approached the amplectant pair nearly twice as often as the lone male, although this pattern was not statistically significant. Males did not exhibit a differential reaction to bright amplectant males versus dull amplectant males. Therefore, variation in male yellow color and the presence of a female do not appear to influence male–male competitive behavior. Overall, this study contributes to our understanding of temporary color change in vibrantly colored anuran species.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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".