Evidence for spittlebug warning colouration and mimicry between Aphrophorine and Cercopine species in a Peruvian valley
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Most tropical spittlebugs of the subfamily Cercopinae are large and boldly coloured insects. Species of this group exhibit a strong odour associated with reflex bleeding and are hypothesized to be protected from predation. Evidence for warning colouration is demonstrated by the discovery that females of a black spittlebug with a broad, contrasting orange band across the middle of the wings, belonging to the genus Sphodroscarta, is an exact mimic of Zuata ephippiata, a Cercopine spittlebug from the same Peruvian valley. The tentatively associated male, S. bimaculata, is black with smaller white spots. The colour pattern of the female is quite distinct from the patterns of other Sphodroscarta, which are darker insects striped or spotted with white or tan. This genus belongs to subfamily Aphrophorinae, which consists almost universally of dull, cryptically coloured insects that lack the distinct odour of Cercopine spittlebugs. Convergence of these distantly related species on a single striking colour pattern in one valley appears to represent a case of female-limited Batesian mimicry and a demonstration of the power of selection for aposematic colouration to influence the evolution of spittlebug colour patterns.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".