Waste management in leaf-cutting ants
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Hygienic behaviour is an important aspect of social organisation because living in aggregations facilitates the spread of disease. Leaf-cutting ants face the additional problem of an obligatory dependency on a fungus, which itself is also susceptible to parasites. In this study we provide evidence for the importance of effective waste management in colonies of several Panamanian species of Atta and Acromyrmex leaf-cutting ants, differing in colony size and typical mode of waste accumulation (external or internal dumps). We show that: (1) waste is dangerous for the ants, which die at a higher rate in the presence of waste; (2) waste is dangerous for the mutualistic fungus because waste in field colonies is infected with the specialised fungal parasite Escovopsis; (3) the ants allocate considerable effort to active management of waste in order to reduce these dangers. This management follows a “conveyer belt” model according to which increasingly dangerous tasks are performed by older workers, who are less valuable to their colony. Our approach is kaleidoscopic, as different species of leafcutting ants are unequally suitable for direct observation and experimental manipulation, and suggests that more in depth studies of waste management in attine ants would be highly rewarding.
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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) | 0.000 | 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 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".