Eltonian shortfall of Neotropical brood parasitism: untapped records from museums and recent field studies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Eltonian shortfall (lack of knowledge about species interactions) is one of the major limitations of biodiversity knowledge. Records from museum egg collections and the literature can still provide critical overlooked information on interactions between brood parasites and hosts. We synthesize overlooked hosts (species known to have reared parasite young successfully) and victims (species that have received parasite eggs in their nests) of Shiny Cowbird (Molothrus bonariensis), Giant Cowbird (Molothrus oryzivorus), and Striped Cuckoo (Tapera naevia), based on egg sets deposited at museums, recent field studies in Brazil, and overlooked published records. For the Shiny Cowbird, we show that Barbados Bullfinch (Loxigilla barbadensis), Peruvian Pipit (Anthus peruvianus), and Red-cowled Cardinal (Paroaria dominicana) are overlooked victims; suggest that Piratic Flycatcher (Legatus leucophaius) may be an overlooked victim; and contribute to few records for seven additional victims and two hosts. We also found a 1905 record of brood parasitism on the Northern Mockingbird (Mimus polyglottos) in Cuba, which might represent an earlier range expansion than known. For the Giant Cowbird, museum records from 1927 from Bolivia revealed three overlooked victims: Dusky-green Oropendola (Psarocolius atrovirens), Olive Oropendola (Psarocolius bifasciatus), and Southern Mountain Cacique (Cacicus chrysonotus). For the Striped Cuckoo, a previously overlooked publication from 2015 and a museum egg set from 1927 reinforced that the Rufous-capped Spinetail (Synallaxis ruficapilla) is a host. Some of the egg sets were stored for more than 100 years in egg collections and could have been previously used in brood parasitism studies and considered much earlier in conservation and management strategies.
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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".