Web reduction behaviour and the chemical communication system of the western black widow, Latrodectus hesperus
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In spiders, pheromones mediate intersexual attraction, courtship behaviour, and mate recognition.I studied the chemical communication system of the western black widow spider, Latrodectus hesperus.Females attract males to their webs with silk-borne sex pheromones.Contact with the silk elicits courtship behaviour by males.Often, the courting male engages in web reduction behaviour, during which he excises and bundles up sections of the web and wraps them with his own silk.Using analytical chemistry, and behavioural tests in both the laboratory and the field, I investigated (1) the molecular structure and function of the female's contact sex pheromone, and (2) the function of web reduction behaviour.A silk-borne contact pheromone elicits web reduction behaviour, and a serine derivative similar to the pheromone of congeneric L. hasselti is one constituent of the multi-component pheromone.Web reduction decreases web attractiveness to rival males in the field, thereby limiting male-male competition.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 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".