Urbanization and individual differences in exploration and plasticity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Urban environments impose novel challenges on animals and, as a result, the behaviors of urban wildlife are changing. In particular, high exploratory tendencies and an ability to gather more information from the environment may facilitate adoption of novel ecological opportunities. As of yet, very few studies have examined if urbanization predicts the way in which animals explore novel environments, or the extent of among-individual variation within these habitats. Here, we assess exploration and its temporal plasticity in black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapillus; N = 169 individuals, 14 sites) caught along an urban gradient to examine individual differences in exploration and changes in exploration over time and assays under a reaction-norm framework. As predicted, urban birds were significantly faster explorers in a novel environment (contacted more features and moved more), however urbanization did not predict individual differences in the change in exploration over time. Exploration score was moderately repeatable; interestingly, urban chickadees were more repeatable in their initial exploration behaviors, but seemed less repeatable in how they explored over time between assays in comparison to forest birds. Our results support the importance of high exploratory tendencies for urban animals, and suggest, for the first time, that individuals from urban and non-urban habitats differ in the amount of among-individual variation in exploration, and thus urban individuals may benefit from diverging more from one another in their behavior. Future work should examine the extent to which this variation in exploration and plasticity of exploration behaviors represent differences in how individuals gather information from their environment.
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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".