Risk‐Taking in Bluebirds After Exposure to a Nest Predator Relates to Parental Roles and Shows Little Cooperation Between Partners
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Parents may experience a trade‐off between caring for offspring and protecting themselves from predators. The reproductive value hypothesis predicts that parents should take more risks for older, more valuable offspring, whereas the harm to offspring hypothesis predicts that parents should risk more for vulnerable offspring that would suffer most from a lack of parental care at the moment. After exposing parent mountain bluebirds (Sialia, currucoides) to a model predator, we recorded latency times for them to touch, to look into, and to enter their nestbox and the number of times they inspected the box across three breeding stages: nest‐building, incubation and nestling‐rearing. Females took greater risks than males during the nest‐building and incubation stages by inspecting and entering boxes sooner and more times, consistent with their role in parental care at those early breeding stages that requires them to enter the box. Risk‐taking in males was consistent with the reproductive value hypothesis, increasing across breeding stages. In contrast, females took the greatest risk during incubation, consistent with the harm to offspring hypothesis. Furthermore, the riskiest behaviours were not correlated between pair members, and both sexes assumed the risk to first inspect the nestbox approximately equally. This suggests there is not a ‘war of attrition’ between mates over risk‐taking, but neither was there cooperation by the male to facilitate the rapid resumption of parental care by his mate. The results highlight that patterns of investment in nest defense in birds may be sex‐specific.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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) | 0.002 | 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".