Intraspecific Variation in Color and Carotenoids across Environmental Extremes in an African Cichlid
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Human activities frequently alter environmental conditions and affect the use of sexually selected traits like color in animals. However, the effects of environmental stressors are unlikely to be uniform across populations that experience different environments or between sexes. We aimed to understand the underlying genetic, environmental, and gene-by-environment contributions to color expression in males and females of a sexually dimorphic fish. Pseudocrenilabrus multicolor is a haplochromine cichlid found in environments that vary dramatically, particularly with respect to oxygen and turbidity levels. We reared fish from one swamp (hypoxic, clear) and one river (normoxic, turbid) population in a split-brood design (hypoxic/normoxic × clear/turbid) and then quantified color and carotenoid concentrations. As expected in this sexually dimorphic species, females were far less colorful than males. In males, hypoxia and turbidity were drivers of traits associated with color, suggesting that color was modified under energetically or visually unfavorable conditions. Males in the hypoxic treatment from both populations were not as bright as males reared under normoxic conditions, which corresponds to results observed in wild fish. Males reared in turbid conditions were also marginally less bright along the ventral surface than males reared in clear water. Rearing under turbid conditions reduced carotenoid concentrations in male skin, but carotenoids were not correlated with spectral characteristics of male color. We did not find effects of population on color traits, suggesting that differences in color between wild populations are due to plastic rather than fixed genetic effects. Overall, we provide evidence that hypoxia and turbidity affect signaling traits, although the consequences for mating success remain to be determined.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 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) | 0.001 | 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".