Variability in functional response curves among larval salamanders: comparisons across species and size classes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Predator species and body size represent critical factors that have differential effects on prey populations, as well as overall community structure. However, investigations of how morphologically-similar predator species, simultaneous to variation in predator body size, influence lower trophic levels are infrequently performed. We tested whether predator species and body size influenced the functional response curve of three larval ambystomatid salamanders (Ringed Salamander, Ambystoma annulatum Cope, 1886; Spotted Salamander, Ambystoma maculatum (Shaw, 1802); Marbled Salamander, Ambystoma opacum (Gravenhorst, 1807)) while eating congeneric prey. We combined larval salamanders of varying body sizes with up to six prey densities within experimental microcosms. We tested for the shape of the functional response curve and obtained parameter estimates for attack rate and handling time for each predator size – species combination. We found variability among both species and size classes, with a combination of type I and type II functional response curves. Large size classes of predators had higher attack rates than smaller size classes, but equivalently-sized larvae of different species exhibited differences in attack rates and handling time. Our study shows that predation risk varies depending on the size structure and diversity of predators present in a food web, and that grouping predators by either species or size class may reduce the ability to predict changes in community structure resulting from such interactions.
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 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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| 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".