The town bird and the country bird: problem solving and immunocompetence vary with urbanization
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Adaptation to urban habitats presumably requires changes in cognitive, behavioral, and physiological traits enabling individuals to exploit new resources. It is predicted that boldness, reduced neophobia, and enhanced problem-solving and learning skills might characterize urban birds compared with their rural conspecifics, while exposure to novel pathogens might require an enhanced immunity. To test these predictions, we assessed problem solving, color discrimination learning, boldness, neophobia, and immunocompetence in the bullfinch Loxigilla barbadensis, a highly opportunistic and innovative endemic bird in Barbados, wild-caught from a range of differently urbanized sites. Birds from urbanized areas were better at problem solving than their rural counterparts, but did not differ in color discrimination learning. They were also bolder but, surprisingly, more neophobic than rural birds. Urban birds also had an enhanced immunocompetence, measured with the phytohemagglutinin antigen. Our study sheds light on the trade-offs acting on animals exposed to changing environments, particularly in the context of urbanization.
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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) | 0.002 | 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".