Hummingbirds choose not to rely on good taste: information use during foraging
Bibliographic record
Abstract
To increase their chances of survival and reproduction, animals must detect changes in food quality and then decide if, and how quickly, to adjust their behavior. How quickly an animal responds to change will depend on the information available (cognitive, sensory, or physiological) and how it weights those types of information. Surrogate measures of meal size suggest that sensory information is used to make initial choices about how much to eat following changes in resource quality, choices are subsequently altered and refined as further information becomes available. Using direct measures, we investigated the amount of food consumed, the time taken to feed, and the interbout intervals between visits to a feeder of rufous hummingbirds, before and after changes in sucrose concentration. The hummingbirds did not change how much they drank at first experience of a new concentration but then rapidly adjusted meal sizes toward optimal for that concentration over a few feeding visits. Thus, it seems the hummingbirds used both cognitive and physiological information to decide how much to drink but appeared to ignore sensory information, such as taste. The early responses animals make to changed resources enable us to determine the types of information on which they rely most in their decision making.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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".