Is dump material an effective small-scale deterrent to herbivory by leaf-cutting ants?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It has been suggested that refuse dumps from leaf-cutting ant nests work as a herbivory deterrent for leaf-cutting ants because dumps harbour micro-organisms that are dangerous to ants and their symbiotic fungus. However, this deterrent effect was tested for the narrowly distributed Atta colombica only during a five-day period. We experimentally tested the refuse-deterrent effect for a longer period using the broadly distributed Acromyrmex lobicornis. Although refuse mounds around plants significantly delayed the initiation of attack by A. lobicornis, almost all plants (~90%), surrounded or not by refuse, were killed by leaf cutters in a few weeks. Therefore, the refuse-deterrent technique may not be useful as a widespread method of biological control for leaf-cutting ants. The refuse showed an improved deterrent effect when both the dump material and the leaf-cutting ant came from the same colony, suggesting that the pathogens for both ant and fungus found in refuse dumps might be nest-specific.
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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 | 0.000 | 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) | 0.000 | 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".