Strong response to anuran chemical cues by an extreme dietary specialist, the eastern hog-nosed snake (<i>Heterodon platirhinos</i>)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Squamate reptiles use the lingual–vomeronasal system to identify food using only chemical cues. In lizards, most of which are dietary generalists that consume a wide variety of arthropods and other small animals, correlated evolution has occurred between addition of plants to the diet and responsiveness to plant chemical cues. In snakes, many of which are dietary specialists, several studies have detected differences in response strength among populations that correspond to the importance of prey types in different geographic locations. In one species of Thamnophis Fitzinger, 1843, such variation in responsiveness has been demonstrated to have a genetic basis. We studied tongue-flicking and biting responses to chemical cues from a range of potential prey types by nine ingestively naive hatchlings of the eastern hog-nosed snake ( Heterodon platirhinos Latreille in Sonnini and Latreille, 1801), which is an extreme toad specialist that less frequently eats other anurans. The snakes responded most strongly to chemical cues from the southern toad ( Bufo terrestris (Bonnaterre, 1789)), as indicated by significantly greater tongue-flick rate. Only two individuals bit in response to chemicals cues, both to the toad cues. Elevated tongue-flick rates were also elicited by chemical cues from the green frog ( Rana clamitans Latreille in Sonnini de Manoncourt and Latreille, 1801), but the mean rate for frog cues was less than for toad cues. Responses to other potential prey types did not differ from those of the control stimuli. Our findings are consistent with those of several other investigators in showing close correspondence between the inclusion and importance of dietary items and the intensity of chemosensory investigation in snakes. Studies of diverse dietary specialists are needed to establish the generality of this relationship in snakes and to demonstrate that diet and chemosensory responses to food cues coevolve.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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 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".