The scent of a hatchling: intra-species variation in the use of chemosensory cues by neonate freshwater turtles
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Chemosensory cues transmit information about the sender's species, sex, reproductive status, health, and genetic relatedness, moderating social behaviour. Adaptations for chemosensory communication and social interactions are well studied in some vertebrate taxa but have been historically discounted in others. For example, chemosensory communication in Testudines was only recently documented, and these studies are largely limited to adults. In the present study, we test the hypothesis that hatchling freshwater turtles can identify conspecific hatchlings and close kin through chemosensory cues and we also investigate potential variation in the use of chemosensory cues among species with different habitat preferences. Hatchling of semi-aquatic species (Emydoidea blandingii and Graptemys geographica) showed no significant preference for conspecific-scented water over unscented water. However, hatchlings of a strictly aquatic species (Apalone spinifera) preferred water scented by conspecific hatchlings to unscented water, and preferred water scented by distantly-related conspecifics to water scented by close kin. Hatchlings of aquatic species may rely more on water-borne chemosensory cues than hatchlings of semi-aquatic species. This is the first evidence of kin recognition in Testudines, and provides an intriguing example of the avoidance of close kin. Increasing the chemical pollution of wetland habitats may impact the ‘chemoscape’ of turtles and other aquatic species, and this potential threat merits further investigation.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.000 |
| 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".