Color Pattern Variation in a Cryptic Amphibian,<i>Anaxyrus fowleri</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many species of animals employ camouflage to render them inconspicuous. Selection to precisely match cryptic color patterns to the background substrate should result in geographic variation in relation to substrate type. We tested this premise by examining color pattern variation in relation to substrate surface in Fowler's Toad (Anaxyrus fowleri), a noxious and cryptically colored amphibian that is widespread in eastern North America and frequently associated with sandy habitats. We quantified total dorsal spot area, number of spots, and size of the four largest dorsal spots among 330 specimens of Fowler's Toads (89 live, 241 preserved) in 14 samples from Canada and the United States. We found no significant difference in the extent or number of spots between males vs. females or between living vs. preserved specimens after compensating for variation in snout–vent length. However, toads from freshwater habitats with extensive areas of open sandy terrain had significantly smaller and fewer dorsal spots than toads from either seacoast localities with open sands present or toads from freshwater habitats with open sands absent. Because saltwater seaside beaches and sand dunes are generally uninhabitable by amphibians, we take this as evidence consistent with the presence of adaptive background pattern matching coloration in this species.
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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".