Morphological and behavioural responses of frog tadpoles to perceived predation risk: A possible role for corticosterone mediation?
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Predators can have an important influence on prey survival and fitness, and many prey species exhibit morphological or behavioural responses to perceived predation risk. Although basic characteristics of anti-predator responses have been well documented, physiological pathways underlying such responses are poorly understood. We sought evidence for a role of corticosterone, a major stress hormone in amphibians, in the behavioural and morphological anti-predator responses of leopard frog tadpoles (Rana pipiens) exposed to caged dragonfly nymphs (Aeshna spp.). By superimposing a metyrapone treatment (corticosteroid synthesis inhibitor) over chronic predator exposure in a 2 × 2 factorial design, we evaluated if tadpole anti-predator responses were mediated by corticosterone. Tadpoles were less active and more likely to exhibit a startle response when exposed to perceived predation risk, but direct and interactive effects of the metyrapone treatment on behaviour were negligible. Predator-exposed tadpoles grew larger and had deeper tail fins, whereas the metyrapone treatment resulted in smaller tadpoles with shallower tail fins. Tadpoles simultaneously exposed to metyrapone treatment and predation risk had reduced tail-fin depth and increased body:tail ratio compared to steroid-normal animals. Because both traits are implicated in tadpole vulnerability to predation, these results suggest that the corticosteroid pathway may mediate tadpole morphological response to perceived predation risk. We provide evidence supporting a possible role for corticosterone in anti-predator responses of amphibians specifically in terms of morphological responses. Our results suggest that corticosteroid adjustment may impact prey survival through phenotypic change upon exposure to predation risk and thereby suggest a possible functional role of this hormonal pathway in amphibian physiological ecology.
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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 it