Hatching plasticity in two temperate anurans: responses to a pathogen and predation cues
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Water molds are widespread in aquatic environments and are important causes of mortality in amphibian and fish eggs. We tested the ability of two species of North American anurans with different breeding phenologies ( Rana sylvatica LeConte, 1825 and Bufo americanus Holbrook, 1836) to alter their hatching timing in response to three indicators of environmental risk: infection with a water mold, exposure to simulated egg predation cues, or exposure to simulated larval predation cues. When infected with water mold (Saprolegniaceae), B. americanus eggs hatched, on average, 44% earlier than the controls and R. sylvatica eggs hatched 19% earlier than the controls. In addition, B. americanus but not R. sylvatica eggs hatched significantly earlier than the controls when exposed to simulated egg and larval predation cues. Bufo americanus embryos hatched before developing muscular response, suggesting that hatching occurs through enzymatic egg capsule degradation combined with ciliary movement, not through behavior. Bufo americanus breeds later than R. sylvatica and responded to infection and simulated predation cues more strongly. This may reflect a history of stronger selection by pathogens and predators that accumulate in ponds as the breeding season progresses. To our knowledge, these are the first examples of induced hatching of amphibians in response to aquatic pathogens.
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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".