Predator‐induced stress and the ecology of fear
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Summary Predator‐induced stress has been used to exemplify the concept of stress for close to a century because almost everyone can imagine the terror of fleeing for one's life from a lion or a tiger. Yet, because it has been assumed to be acute and transitory, predator‐induced stress has not been much studied by either comparative physiologists or population ecologists, until relatively recently. The focus in biomedical research has always been on chronic stress in humans, which most comparative physiologists would agree results from ‘sustained psychological stress – linked to mere thoughts’ rather than ‘acute physical crises’ (like surviving a predator attack) or ‘chronic physical challenges’ (such as a shortage of food). Population ecologists have traditionally focused solely on the acute physical crisis of surviving a direct predator attack rather than whether the risk of such an attack may have a sustained effect on other demographic processes (e.g. the birth rate). Demographic experiments have now demonstrated that exposure to predators or predator cues can have sustained effects that extend to affecting birth and survival in free‐living animals, and a subset of these have documented associated physiological stress effects. These and similar results have prompted some authors to speak of an ‘ecology of fear’, but others object that ‘the cognitive and emotional aspects of avoiding predation remain unknown’. Recent biomedical studies on animals in the laboratory have demonstrated that exposure to predators or predator cues can induce ‘sustained psychological stress’ that is directly comparable to chronic stress in humans, and this has now in fact become one of the most common stressors used in studies of the animal model of post‐traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). We review these recent findings and suggest ways the laboratory techniques developed to measure the ‘neural circuitry of fear’ could be adapted for use on free‐living animals in the field, in order to: (i) test whether predator risk induces ‘sustained psychological stress’ in wild animals, comparable to chronic stress in humans and (ii) directly investigate ‘the cognitive and emotional aspects of avoiding predation’ and hence the ‘ecology of fear’.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".