Sensory determinants of agonistic interactions in the red-backed salamander, Plethodon cinereus
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many animals use and react to multimodal signals — signals that occur in more than one sensory modality. This study focused on the respective roles of vision, chemoreception, and their possible interaction in determining agonistic responses of the red-backed salamander, Plethodon cinereus. The use of a computer display allowed separate or combined presentation of visual and chemical cues. A cue isolation experiment using adult male and juvenile salamanders showed that both visual and chemical cues from unfamiliar male conspecifics could increase aggressive displays. Submissive displays were only increased in juveniles, and specifically by the visual cue. The rate of chemoinvestigation of the substrate was increased only by chemical cues in adults, whereas both chemical and visual cues increased this behaviour in juveniles. Chemoinvestigation appears, thus, more dependent on sensory input in juvenile salamanders. A follow-up experiment comparing responses to visual cues of different animals (conspecific salamander, heterospecific salamander and earthworm) or an inanimate object (wood stick) showed that exploratory behaviour was higher in the presence of the inanimate object stimulus. The heterospecific salamander stimulus produced strong submissive and escape responses, while the conspecific salamander stimulus promoted aggressive displays. Finally, the earthworm stimulus increased both aggressive and submissive behaviours at intermediate levels when compared to salamander cues. These specific combinations of agonistic and exploratory responses to each stimulus suggest that salamanders could discriminate the cues visually. This study sheds some light on how information from different sensory modalities guides social behaviour at different life stages in a salamander.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| 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) | 0.001 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".