Rare observation of an extra-pair copulation in American Oystercatchers ( <i>Haematopus palliatus</i> )
Bibliographic record
Abstract
American Oystercatchers (Haematopus palliatus) are typically described as monogamous breeding shorebirds. In 2024, I observed an extra-pair copulation by American Oystercatchers in Virginia, USA. The extra-pair copulation occurred between within-season nesting attempts, where a female traveled 1,700 m to copulate at an extra-pair male’s breeding territory. Across three field seasons of intensive monitoring of breeding activities, from 2022 to 2024, on two barrier islands in Virginia, this was the only extra-pair copulation observed, compared to 31 observed within-pair copulations. The extra-pair copulation was consistent with the female control hypothesis and the extra-territorial foray hypothesis. Potential adaptive functions behind the extra-pair copulation for the female may include fertility insurance, reduced inbreeding depression, or mate switching. Future studies might use GPS tracking to investigate the frequency, timing, and nature of extra-territorial foray behaviors.
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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".