Caterpillar talk: Acoustically mediated territoriality in larval Lepidoptera
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We provide evidence for conspecific acoustic communication in caterpillars. Larvae of the common hook-tip moth, Drepana arcuata (Drepanoidea), defend silk nest sites from conspecifics by using ritualized acoustic displays. Sounds are produced by drumming the mandibles and scraping the mandibles and specialized anal "oars" against the leaf surface. Staged interactions between a resident and intruder resulted in escalated acoustic "duels" that were typically resolved within minutes, but sometimes extended for several hours. Resident caterpillars generally won territorial disputes, regardless of whether they had built the nest, but relatively large intruders occasionally displaced residents from their nests. All evidence is consistent with acoustic signaling serving a territorial function. As with many vertebrates, ritualized signaling appears to allow contestants to resolve contests without physical harm. Comparative evidence indicates that larval acoustic signaling may be widespread throughout the Lepidoptera, meriting consideration as a principal mode of communication for this important group of insects.
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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 | 0.001 | 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".