Can the form of sexual selection explain patterns of static weapon allometry expressed by alternative mating morphotypes?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The regime of selection acting on a trait is expected to shape its static allometry. Few studies, however, have quantified the form of sexual selection acting on a trait in the wild to test whether the trait allometrically scales as predicted. Even fewer studies have tested these predictions using males expressing weapon polymorphism as part of their alternative mating strategies. Here, I use field data to test how sexual selection shapes scaling allometries of male weaponry in the Wellington tree wētā (H. crassidens), a male-trimorphic and harem-polygynous insect endemic to New Zealand. Contrary to the prediction that 10th instar males' large weaponry would scale hyperallometrically because it is under direct sexual selection, I found that 10th instar weaponry is not subject to direct sexual selection and scales hypoallometrically. Similarly, neither 8th nor 9th instar male weaponry experiences direct sexual selection, and their weaponry scales hyperallometrically and hypoallometrically, respectively. My study suggests that disentangling competing hypotheses for the evolution of scaling patterns of sexually selected traits must go beyond a simple viability-sexual selection dichotomy by also considering weapon function and the ecological context within which the weapon is used.
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 machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".