Sophisticated early life lessons: threat-sensitive generalization of predator recognition by embryonic amphibians
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 ability to develop effective antipredator responses early in life should be strongly promoted by natural selection. Recent work has shown that embryonic amphibians can learn to recognize predators even before they hatch. Here, we showed that embryonic woodfrogs, Rana sylvatica, learned the danger level associated with a predator prior to hatching and generalized their learned recognition to other similar predators with which the woodfrogs lacked experience. Embryos exposed to salamander odor (SO) paired with injured tadpole cues learned to recognize the salamander Ambystoma tigrinum, but those exposed to SO paired with well water did not. When we increased the concentration of alarm cues to which embryos were exposed, tadpoles showed stronger response to salamander cues. In addition, the tadpoles generalize their learned response to the odor of closely related newts Cynops pyrrhogaster but not Xenopus frogs. In accordance with the Predator Recognition Continuum Hypothesis, the ability to generalize was dependent on the threat level of the predator. Our results highlight the sophistication of learned responses to predators by embryonic amphibians and stress the need for studies in other taxa.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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