When and how do predator starting distances affect flight initiation distances?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The distance separating predator and prey when the predator begins to approach, starting distance, was recently shown to affect flight initiation distance in many bird species, raising questions about the effect's generality, variation with ecological factors, and economic basis. I studied the effect in two lizard species that forage by ambush and escape into nearby refuges. Monitoring costs during approach are absent because ambushers remain immobile while scanning for prey and predators. Risks are minimized because of the proximity to refuge. Flight initiation distance increased weakly with starting distance in Sceloporus virgatus Smith, 1938 significantly only at rapid approach speed. It was not significant in Urosaurus ornatus (Baird and Girard, 1852) at slow approach speed. Flight initiation distance is predicted to increase with starting distance, owing to monitoring costs and assessment by prey of greater risk during prolonged approaches. The significant effect in S. virgatus, which lacks monitoring costs, is the first indication that risk affects the relationship between starting distance and flight initiation distance. Conditions in which starting distance is important and its possible effects in earlier studies are discussed, as well as standardizing approaches and possible artifactual effects of starting distance.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| 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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".