The omnivorous collared peccary negates an insectivore-generated trophic cascade in Costa Rican wet tropical forest understorey
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: Insectivorous birds and bats often protect plants through density- and trait-mediated cascades, but the degree to which insectivores reduce herbivorous arthropods and leaf damage varies among systems. Top-down interaction strength may be influenced by the biotic and abiotic context, including the presence of vegetation-disturbing animals. We tested two hypotheses: (1) insectivorous birds and bats initiate trophic cascades in tropical rain-forest understorey; and (2) the native, omnivorous collared peccary ( Pecari tajacu ) negates these cascades via non-trophic effects. We studied the top-down effects of birds and bats on understorey plants in north-eastern Costa Rica using 60 netted exclosures within and outside existing peccary exclosures. Excluding birds and bats increased total arthropod densities by half, both with and without peccaries. Bird/bat exclosures increased Diptera density by 28% and leaf damage by 24% without peccaries, consistent with a trophic cascade. However, bird/bat exclosures decreased Diptera density by 32% and leaf damage by 34% with peccaries, a negation of the trophic cascade. Excluding peccaries increased leaf damage by 43% on plants without birds and bats. This is the first study, to our knowledge, to demonstrate that the non-trophic activity of an omnivorous ungulate can reverse a trophic cascade.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 it