Experimental evidence for latent developmental plasticity: intertidal whelks respond to a native but not an introduced predator
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Animals with highly inducible traits may show no inducible response when exposed to a related but wholly novel cue. This appears to be true for the intertidal whelk Nucella lamellosa faced with a voracious introduced predator. In the laboratory, we exposed whelks to effluent from two species of predatory crab, the native red rock crab Cancer productus and the invasive European green crab Carcinus maenas. Nucella and Cancer have a long shared history in the northeast Pacific, whereas potential interaction with Carcinus began here less than 10 years ago. Although Nucella responded adaptively to Cancer effluent by increasing shell thickness and decreasing somatic growth, there was no such response to Carcinus. Furthermore, thicker shelled Nucella were less likely to be eaten by Carcinus. Because Nucella produces thicker shells when exposed to Cancer cues, its ability to respond similarly to Carcinus depends only on the coupling of the Carcinus cue to the existing developmental pathways for adaptive changes in shell form. Such coupling of latent plasticity to a novel cue -- via genetic changes or associative learning -- could explain many cases of rapid phenotypic change following a sudden shift in the environment.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".