Stealthy slugs and communicating corals: polyp withdrawal by an aggregating soft coral in response to injured neighbors
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The polyps of Discophyton rudyi (Verseveldt and van Ofwegen, 1992), a small, aggregating, alcyonacean soft coral found on rocky shores in the northeast Pacific Ocean, are selectively preyed on by the nudibranch Tritonia festiva (Stearns, 1873). In the laboratory, D. rudyi retracted their polyps when exposed to water-borne cues from a conspecific colony that was successfully attacked by T. festiva. This same inter-colony response was elicited by attacks simulated with fine scissors, but not by (i) the presence of T. festiva attempting to feed but prevented from damaging its prey, (ii) the simple withdrawal of the soft coral polyps, or (iii) seawater controls. The cue(s) eliciting polyp retraction therefore emanate from the soft coral and not its nudibranch predator. Tritonia festiva often attacks neighboring colonies, which are usually separated by only a few millimetres, in rapid succession but will not attack colonies with retracted polyps. It also cannot move rapidly to reach more distant colonies. Therefore, polyp retraction by one colony in response to predation on a neighboring colony effectively serves as an anti-predatory alarm response. Although aggregations of D. rudyi are largely clonal, the response to water-borne cues from injured conspecifics does not appear to be clone-specific. Few examples of intra-specific alarm responses are known from sessile marine invertebrates, but the similarities between them suggest that other examples may be found in suspension or deposit-feeding taxa that form dense aggregations and are preyed on by stealthy partial-predators likely to attack adjacent individuals or colonies in rapid succession.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| 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 | 0.001 |
| 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".