Cornicle length in Macrosiphini aphids: a comparison of ecological traits
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract 1. Aphids often emit cornicle droplets when attacked by predators. While the function of cornicle droplets has long been debated (i.e. mechanical protection vs. chemical signalling), it is not understood why aphid species have cornicles of different lengths. 2. It was hypothesised that aphids living in more scattered colonies have longer cornicles to scent‐mark predators with cornicle droplets containing alarm pheromone, so that clone‐mates are provided with advanced warning of a threat, even if not at the predation site. To test this hypothesis, multiple regression analyses were used, due to a lack of phylogenetic information on these taxa, to address which ecological traits (amount of wax on an aphid, degree of colony aggregation, feeding shelter, ant attendance) are correlated with cornicle length. 3. Aphids living in dense colonies tended to have shorter cornicles than aphids living in more scattered colonies. Also, aphids with more protection (i.e. wax) on their bodies had shorter cornicles. Aphids also tended to have shorter cornicles when tended by ants. The presence of a feeding shelter was not a good predictor of cornicle length. 4. It is suggested that longer cornicles function to scent‐mark predators with alarm pheromone to increase the inclusive fitness of a clone; however the negative correlation between the amount of individual protection, and also ant attendance, and cornicle length argues for a trade‐off between different forms of defence.
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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) | 0.001 | 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) | 0.016 | 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".