Evidence for Caste Differences in Anal Droplet Alarm Pheromone Production and Responses in the Eusocial Thrips <i>Kladothrips intermedius</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Thrips (Thysanoptera) are tiny insects that produce anal secretions when threatened. Several studies have shown that, depending on the species, the droplets may contain alarm pheromones and/or repellents against enemies. In the eusocial gall‐inducing thrips Kladothrips intermedius both larvae and adults produce such droplets. There are two castes of adults in this species, soldiers (the sub‐fertile and gall‐bound defenders) and dispersers (winged and capable of initiating a gall). We tested the proclivity of secreting anal droplets by the two castes and whether the anal droplets induce different behavioural responses in relation to the emitter–receiver's caste in a contact chemoreception bioassay. Although secretion patterns were similar between castes, exposure to anal droplets emitted by different castes elicited different behavioural responses in adults in the bioassay. When exposed to soldiers’ anal droplets, dispersers significantly reduced the distance moved while soldiers significantly increased the distance moved, compared to when they were exposed to hexane control. In contrast, no differences in the distance moved were observed for any caste when exposed to dispersers’ anal droplets versus hexane control. Increased activity in soldiers when exposed to their own anal droplets is a predicted response to enhance the overall defence of the gall when under threat, whereas dispersers should slow down their activity when exposed to such ‘warning signal’. Thus, the behavioural data indicate that the anal droplets emitted by soldiers are likely to contain an alarm pheromone.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".