Social pairing in the absence of reproductive senescence in a socially monogamous songbird
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Reproductive senescence may affect mating decisions if older individuals produce fewer and lower-quality offspring, but the effect of reproductive senescence on mate choice decisions remains poorly understood. Mountain chickadees (Poecile gambeli) do not exhibit clear reproductive senescence within their natural lifespans and therefore offer a unique opportunity to test whether the absence or delay of reproductive senescence affects social mate choice for mates of certain ages. Given the lack of obvious reproductive senescence in this species, we predicted that older individuals would be preferred as social mates because pairing with an experienced mate is often associated with direct and indirect benefits. In apparent support of our predictions, we observed positive assortment for age within breeding pairs and older individuals were more likely to be paired with one another than expected by chance. However, assortative pairing also occurred within most younger age classes, and when we restricted our analyses to consider only new pairings, rates of assortative pairing within age classes were similar to those expected by chance. Thus, the observed pattern of age-related assortative mating in this system likely occurs due to longevity of some pair bonds rather than active assortment for age among individuals forming new pair bonds. Combined, our results suggest that choice of a social mate based on age may be constrained in socially monogamous mating systems when many individuals maintain long-term pair bonds.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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".