A behaviourally plastic jack-of-all-trades mating strategy in the Wellington tree wētā
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Intense sexual selection on males can lead to the evolution of alternative mating strategies. Alternative strategies represent a correlated suite of traits that function to achieve fertilization success in specialized ways. Mate-guarders are often more combative and sedentary than sneakers who forgo combat to actively search for unguarded females. If present, third strategies could adopt a jack-of-all-trades phenotype whereby a mix of sneaker and guarder phenotypes is expressed. This strategy should show greater within-individual behavioural variation than the other specialized morphs. I tested this hypothesis using the Wellington tree wētā, Hemideina crassidens , an orthopteran insect in which males express three genetically polymorphic strategies: 10th-instar males are sedentary and sport mandibular weaponry to defend harems, whereas precocially maturing eighth-instar males search for mates in foliage while avoiding physical combat. Ninth-instar males represent a third morphotype that will sedentarily defend harems and also actively search for mates. I show here that, as expected, ninth-instar males express significantly greater within-individual variation in two behaviours relevant to mate searching than either eighth- or 10th-instar males. My findings support the hypothesis that ninth-instar males are more behaviourally plastic than the other specialized morphs.
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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".