Costs of behavioral synchrony as a potential driver behind size-assorted grouping
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Group-living animals must synchronize their behavior to maintain group cohesion. Synchrony is best maintained by individuals similar in size because they have similar activity budgets and thus can easily coordinate their behavior, which minimizes potential trade-offs. Many groups assort by size, presumably to reduce predation risk and foraging competition. However, because groups can only be maintained by individuals that synchronize their behavior, we propose that maintenance of synchrony may also be an important factor contributing to size-assorted grouping. Similar-sized individuals should maintain synchrony through similar swimming speeds, similar foraging activity and through cohesiveness with the group, and, therefore, pay the least costs of group-living: body mass should increase over time. However, odd-sized fishes may have to adjust their foraging activities and thus lose body mass because of the need of synchrony. We measured the aforementioned variables using varying sizes (large and small) and colors (red and wild-type) of heterogeneous (1 odd focal fish among 5 similar fishes) and homogeneous (6 similar fishes) groups of zebra fishes. Groups composed of similar-sized individuals had the highest degree of synchrony—small fishes gained mass, whereas large fishes grew very little or not at all. Groups composed of different-sized individuals, although able to maintain synchrony most of the time, did so at significantly lower levels than similar-sized fishes—odd small fishes in these groups gained significantly less mass, whereas odd large fishes did not. We show that synchrony in behavior is costly and that these costs may contribute, in part, to group choice.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 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".