Intense seed predation by harvester ants on a rare mustard
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Seed predation can significantly restrict the reproductive output and fitness of individual plants, and its population-level consequences may be most severe for plants that are rare or endangered. The Owyhee harvester ant, Pogonomyrmex salinus, actively removes the fruits and seeds of slickspot peppergrass, Lepidium papilliferum, a rare mustard endemic to Idaho. We conducted a field study to investigate the extent to which P. salinus contributes to seed loss in L. papilliferum. On average, individual L. papilliferum exposed to P. salinus experienced a direct loss of > 40% of their mature fruits, whereas plants shielded from ants suffered almost no fruit loss. More than 90% of L. papilliferum seeds placed on the ground beneath plants were scavenged by ants. All L. papilliferum fruits and seeds collected by P salinus were returned to the ants' nests and transported below ground. A search of 30 middens revealed large quantities of empty L. papilliferum fruit husks, but no intact seeds. Thus, it does not appear that the ants benefit L. papilliferum by dispersing the plant's seeds. No seed predation was detected on plants located > 20 m from a P salinus colony. We conclude that P. salinus is the main seed predator of L. papilliferum and that in many cases the ants remove and destroy almost all of an individual plant's seeds. Seed removal of this magnitude suggests that P. salinus may significantly limit recruitment of L. papilliferum, which could lead to further decline of this rare species.
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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) | 0.000 | 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".