Do House Wrens (<i>Troglodytes aedon</i>) add spider egg cases to their nests for heterospecific cleaning?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
House Wrens (Troglodytes aedon Vieillot, 1809) regularly add spider egg cases (Arachnida: Araneae) to their nests, which may be an example of heterospecific cleaning. This behavior involves one animal employing another to remove parasites from their nests. In House Wren nests, juvenile spiders hatching from egg cases may facilitate the reduction of mites that feed on nestlings. We tested this ectoparasite reduction hypothesis by monitoring House Wren nests for spider egg cases and by collecting completed nests to compare the number of spider egg cases and Dermanyssus hirundinis (Hermann, 1804) mites. No significant relationship was found between the number of spider egg cases and number of D. hirundinis mites in nests. We also found no significant relationship between the number of D. hirundinis mites in nests and the body condition of nestlings. Finally, no significant difference was found between the number of D. hirundinis mites in early versus late season nests, but significantly more spider egg cases were added to late season nests. Of a subsample of spider egg cases dissected, we found that 28% contained spider eggs or embryos. We also identified three species of juvenile spiders from House Wren nests using DNA barcoding. Overall, we found no evidence that spider egg cases reduce the number of D. hirundinis mites or engender better quality offspring in House Wren nests.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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".