Sister clade comparisons reveal reduced maternal care behavior in social cobweb spiders
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Animals living in cooperative groups experience fundamentally different environments than their nonsocial relatives, potentially changing the strength of natural selection on some aspects of their behavior. Using a comparative approach, we examined a potential example of this phenomenon: an association between reduced levels of maternal care behavior and sociality in cobweb spiders. We compared 6 different measures of maternal care behavior between species from 2 independently derived social clades and subsocial species from sister clades. In natural nests, we measured the mean distance between egg sacs and the nearest female and the proportion of egg sacs being attended. In the lab, we measured a female’s willingness to accept an egg sac, abandon her egg sac when disturbed, repair a damaged egg sac, and the speed at which a female reclaimed her egg sac when separated from it. Social species from both social clades scored significantly lower than subsocial species from sister clades on 6 and 4 of 6 of these assays of maternal care, respectively. We discuss alternative explanations of this pattern, including the potential role of relaxed natural selection in a social environment in permitting the evolution of a novel “low-parenting” phenotype.
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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) | 0.001 | 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 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".