Are morphometric traits cryptic indicators of sexual size dimorphism in ‘monomorphic’ species? Evidence from the King Vulture ( <i>Sarcoramphus papa</i> )
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Understanding sexual dimorphism is essential for ecological and evolutionary research, as it can influence species adaptation, population dynamics and the development of effective conservation strategies. Evidence suggests that sexual size dimorphism is absent or subtle in over 50% of bird species – including most New World vultures (Cathartiformes). We employed a molecular sexing and morphometric analysis approach to assess whether this pattern is present in the King Vulture Sarcoramphus papa and to determine whether males and females can be distinguished morphometrically. We present evidence of moderate male‐biased sexual size dimorphism in the King Vulture, showing that head and bill measurements – and to a lesser extent, wing traits – can be used to discriminate between sexes based on extreme values, thus challenging the traditional view of monomorphism in cathartids and highlighting the value of morphometric analyses in detecting cryptic sexual differences in species considered monomorphic.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| 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".