Group size effect in nutmeg mannikin: between-individuals behavioral differences but same plasticity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When group size increases, animals from a wide range of taxa reduce vigilance and increase feeding rate, the so-called group size effect. This effect requires that group members display plastic behavioral responses both in terms of vigilance and foraging to obtain the security benefit from grouping and/or to cope with feeding competition. Most studies on group size effects have reported mean group changes in behavior. However, individuals’ adjustment of behavior and thus their individual contribution to the overall group-level plasticity remain unexplored. Using wild-caught nutmeg mannikins (Lonchura punctulata), small estrildid finches known to exhibit the group size effect, we investigated individual differences in baseline levels and in plasticity of vigilance and feeding behavior. We experimentally manipulated the number of companions foraging with focal birds and noted how they individually adjusted their vigilance and foraging behavior when group size varied. We found that individuals differed consistently in their vigilance level and foraging rate but not in their ability to adjust to experimental variation in group size. Effect sizes for individual consistency in behavior were as large as those for group-level plasticity. Our results reveal high, albeit not maximal, levels of plasticity in both vigilance and feeding behavior for all individuals in this social foraging context.
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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) | 0.001 | 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 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".