Long-term evaluation of the association between dominance, bib size, sex and age

The association between dominance and phenotypic traits (‘badges of status’) has been recently questioned, since it has been found to show more variation across populations and time than expected. Using an eleven-year dataset, encompassing more than 1,800 individuals, we studied the association between the size of a melanin-based plumage trait (a black patch under the beak or ‘bib’), individual attributes (age and sex), and dominance. Our study model, the Sociable Weaver (Philetairus socius), is a small passerine that lives year-round in colonies of varying size. Bib sizes were obtained from pictures and automatically pre-processed with an object segmentation deep learning network. We recorded 36,346 dominance-related interactions to estimate dominance hierarchies. We then investigated the effect of sex and age on bib size, and the overall and between-year association of bib size and age with dominance for each sex. We found that bib size increased with age within individuals of both se..., , # Long-term evaluation of the association between dominance, bib size, sex, and age

Dataset DOI: [https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.v15dv4290](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.v15dv4290)

## Objective of the study

The objective is to understand the long-term association between bib size and age with dominance in sociable weavers (*Philetairus socius*).

The project is organised into two parts: the statistical analysis with the datasets and the scripts (more details in the publication), and the deep learning model developed for phenotypic trait segmentation based on pictures. See also README.html.

The folder contains four directories (more details below and available in data_scripts_and_results.zip):

* Data
* Documents
* Results
* Scripts

# Documents

Contains the link to the publication related to this Git.

# Data

Two sub-directories inside:

* database_manuscript_analysis
* pictures_bib_to_train_segmentation_model

## Database manuscript analysis

Four files are listed inside.

The fir..., , **Changes after Oct 9, 2025:** 

Addition of Raw data to produce the datasets for the analyses in the manuscript. Also updated the Readme.html file.