Experimental Evidence for the Rapid Evolution of Behavioral Canalization in Natural Populations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canalization-the evolutionary loss of the capacity of organisms to develop different phenotypes in different environments-is an evolutionary phenomenon suspected to occur widely, although examples in natural populations are elusive. Because behavior is typically a highly flexible component of an individual's phenotype, it provides fertile ground for studying the evolution of canalization. Here we report how snail populations exposed for different lengths of time to a predatory crab introduced from Europe to America exhibit different degrees of canalization of an adaptive antipredator behavior: soft tissue withdrawal, measured as angular retraction depth. Where crab-snail contact is shortest (60 years), snails showed the highest behavioral flexibility. Where crabs invaded 110 years ago, snails showed significantly less behavioral flexibility, and where the interaction is ancient (Europe), snails exhibited highly canalized behavior. Selection therefore appears to have acted rapidly to increase canalization in wild snail populations, leading ultimately to the hard-wired behavior seen in European conspecifics.
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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) | 0.000 | 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".