Prepupal Building Behavior in Drosophila melanogaster and Its Evolution under Resource and Time Constraints
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Structures built by animals are a widespread and ecologically important 'extended phenotype'. While its taxonomic diversity has been well described, factors affecting short-term evolution of building behavior within a species have received little experimental attention. Here we describe how, given the opportunity, wandering Drosophila melanogaster larvae often build long tunnels in agar substrates and embed their pupae within them. These embedded larvae are characterized by a longer egg-to-pupariation developmental time than larvae that pupate on the surface. Assuming that such building behaviors are likely to be energetically costly and/or time consuming, we hypothesized that they should evolve to be less pronounced under resource or time limitation. In accord with this prediction, larvae from populations evolved for 160 generations under a regime that combines larval malnutrition with limited developmental time dug shorter tunnels than larvae from control unselected populations. However, the proportion of larvae that embedded before pupation did not differ between the malnutrition-adapted and control populations, suggesting that tunnel length and likelihood of embedding before pupation are controlled by different genetic loci. The behaviors exhibited by wandering larvae of Drosophila melanogaster prior to pupation offer a model system to study evolution of animal building behaviors because the tunneling and embedding phenotypes are simple, facultative and highly variable.
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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".