Time perception-based decision making in a parasitoid wasp
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The capacity of animals to measure time and adjust their behaviors accordingly has been a topic of interest in vertebrates, but little evidence is currently available for insects. This capacity has yet to be properly investigated in parasitoid wasps, even though they are frequently used to test ecological models. Here, using associative learning between odors and time intervals, we show that the parasitoid wasp Microplitis croceipes (Hymenoptera: Braconidae) has the capacity to measure time. When released in a wind tunnel, females flew toward an odor associated with the time interval they had just experienced. We also found that reducing energy expenditure by restraining parasitoid wasp movement during the training interval prevented time perception. This serves as experimental evidence of time perception in a parasitoid wasp, provides both a rare example of learning associated to a time interval in an insect and a mechanism by which these animals could optimize their behaviors, as well as suggesting a role for energy expenditure in its time perception mechanism.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".