Nest feathering by tree swallows (Tachycineta bicolor) in response to artificial warming
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Bird nests protect eggs, developing young, and incubating adults from inclement weather and predation. In Tree Swallows (Tachycineta bicolor) females are solely responsible for incubating eggs. Prior to and while females are incubating, males compete with rivals for feathers that they use to line nests. The thermal benefits hypothesis proposes that this is because maintenance of proper egg temperatures is critical. I tested the thermal benefits hypothesis: I predicted that artificially heating Tree Swallow nests would result in addition of fewer feathers. I quantified feathers from Tree Swallow nests in the Annapolis Valley, Nova Scotia, and St. Denis, Saskatchewan. Nesting started the first week of May and continued into mid June. At both locations nests were randomly assigned to control or experimental treatments. In Nova Scotia wire platforms were added under nests early in nest-building so that later manipulations would cause reduced disturbance. Experimental nests had 24h heating pads (spent pads were used for controls) placed under them that were replaced daily until culmination of incubation. Contrary to the thermal benefits hypothesis, there was no statistically significant difference in feather numbers between control and experimental nests. However, nests initiated earlier in the season had significantly more feathers than those initiated later in the season. Further studies will have to be conducted to determine if feather addition is also facultative in response to other variables. Key words: artificial heating, nest feathering, Tachycineta bicolor, Tree Swallow.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.001 | 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".