Beware of bats, beware of birds: the auditory responses of eared moths to bat and bird predation
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The allotonic frequency hypothesis (AFH) proposes that the preponderance of moths in the diets of some bats (e.g., Rhinolophidae) is the result of these bats echolocating at allotonic frequencies, that is, outside of the typical hearing range of most moths (ca., 20–60 kHz). The broader hearing range of African moths (5–110 kHz) suggests that their ears may function at frequencies usually considered allotonic. We investigated 1) whether moth ears were functionally audible to the Cape horseshoe bat, Rhinolophus capensis (Rhinolophidae), which forages in dense vegetation and echolocates at 84 kHz, and 2) whether moth auditory sensitivity below 10 kHz allows them to detect the rustling noises made by bird predators as they pursued moths through vegetation. The calls of R. capensis were audible to moths albeit over shorter distances relative to syntonic bats. Shorter detection distances combined with the constrained spaces in the cluttered habitat in which rhinolophids forage give moths both less time and less space within which to react to an attacking bat. Thus, the AFH in combination with habitat offers a better explanation for the preponderance of moths in the diets of rhinolophids than either of them on their own. Moths also responded both neurologically and behaviorally to the rustling sounds made by birds (Cape Bulbul, Pycnonotus capensis) as they pursued moths. We suggest that the high sensitivity of moths to frequencies from 5 to 10 kHz allows them to avoid these avian attacks by using responses that have traditionally been considered solely anti-bat behavior.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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