The position of eyespots and thickened segments influence their protective value to caterpillars
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It has long been believed that the paired circular markings (“eyespots”) of Lepidoptera larvae, combined with their defensive postures (where the larvae swell their anterior body segments) protect them from potential predators. These traits could inhibit attacks by enhancing the similarity of the prey item to the predator’s own natural enemies (notably snakes), but alternatively, they may simply exploit the predator’s wariness of novel and/or conspicuous objects. To differentiate between these contrasting explanations, we evaluated the responses of naive chicks (Gallus gallus domesticus) to artificial caterpillar-like prey. In the first experiment, chicks were presented with model caterpillars either without eyespots or with eyespots positioned in 1 of 2 locations on their bodies: anteriorly or centrally. In the second experiment, chicks were presented with model caterpillars either lacking the thickening associated with the defensive posture, or with models in which a thickened section was placed centrally or anteriorly. In both cases, the chicks were significantly more wary of prey with anteriorly positioned defensive traits than either prey without these traits or prey with centrally positioned traits. Because prey with central eyespots and central thickening were equally novel and conspicuousness to those with these traits positioned in a more head-like anterior position, we infer that predator wariness was primarily influenced by the similarity of the prey to their potential natural enemies. These results support the idea that both caterpillar eyespots, and the defensive posture examined here, deter predators not simply because they are conspicuous, but because they enhance caterpillars’ resemblance to potentially dangerous vertebrates.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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".