Host response to conspecific brood parasitism in colonial red‐breasted mergansers <i>Mergus serrator</i> : positioning of parasitic eggs within the clutch
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Brood parasitism can be costly to host fitness, which in turn may favour host strategies that decrease these costs. Duck (Anatinae) nests are often parasitized by eggs of other ducks, and one way that hosts can respond to potentially costly brood parasitism is to move parasitic eggs to the clutch periphery, where egg incubation temperatures can be suboptimal relative to the clutch centre. We explored whether red‐breasted mergansers Mergus serrator use discriminatory egg incubation against parasitic eggs laid by conspecifics in a population where conspecific brood parasitism (CBP) is common. We used isoelectric focusing electrophoresis of egg albumen from entire clutches of 12 parasitized nests to identify parasitic eggs. A randomization test pooling identified parasitic eggs (n = 50) across nests revealed that hosts did not position parasitic eggs along the periphery of clutches or out of the central region more than was expected by chance, and this was the case for parasitic eggs laid both before and after the onset of incubation. Similarly, nest‐level analyses showed that parasitic eggs were random in all but the smallest clutch, which contained one identified parasitic egg. Thus, parasitic eggs were not moved to the periphery of heavily parasitized clutches, where egg temperature gradients between central and peripheral regions of nests are expected to be greatest. Only four eggs (< 0.5% of 1276 eggs) were found buried within nest bowls. Eggs that were removed from nests consisted of parasite and host eggs and were more likely along the periphery of clutches prior to their removal than was expected by chance. Our results indicate that discriminatory egg incubation of parasitic eggs is not a well‐developed tactic for defending against CBP in red‐breasted mergansers, though hosts may rely on certain cues to decide which eggs are to be removed from nests (e.g. addled eggs).
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".