Male activity under risk predicts paternal care and reproductive success in a bi-parental cichlid
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Here, we explored a hypothesis from a framework proposing that sexual selection plays a role in shaping and maintaining consistent among-individual behavioral variation, commonly referred to as personality differences. This framework suggests that parental care may be a mechanism linking personality differences with reproductive fitness. To test this hypothesis, we repeatedly measured boldness as activity under simulated predation risk in male and female rainbow kribs, Pelvicachromis pulcher, a bi-parental West African cichlid. We then formed breeding pairs with varying degrees of behavioral contrast in boldness, recorded parental care (parental activity under risk and brood guarding) for both parents, and assessed key reproductive outcomes: the likelihood to reproduce, clutch size, offspring survival, and offspring size at the end of breeding. We observed consistent among-individual variation in all three behaviors. Males with higher pre-breeding activity under risk were less likely to reproduce. However, when these males did breed successfully, they achieved higher offspring survival rates compared to their less active counterparts. This relationship was mediated by parental care: males with higher pre-breeding activity under risk spent more time guarding their brood, and increased brood guarding was associated with higher offspring survival. Female pre-breeding activity under risk was not associated with parental care or reproductive success. These results suggest that male, but not female boldness might be subject to sexual selection. The observed pattern of bold males siring fewer but larger broods than less bold males could maintain among-individual variation in male boldness if it results in equal average fitness (eg due to environmental heterogeneity).
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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".