Collective aggressiveness of an ecosystem engineer is associated with coral recovery
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The ecological impacts of animal groups may be different and predictable depending on their collective behavior. Farmerfish (Stegastes nigricans) live in social groups and collectively defend gardens of palatable algae. These gardens also serve as settlement and nursery habitats for corals because farmerfish mob corallivores that attempt to forage on corals within these gardens. We detected large among-colony differences in farmerfish collective aggression towards intruder fish that persisted across years. We further found that the territories of aggressive groups and territories containing larger farmerfish provided greater protection to corals: territories of aggressive groups naturally harbored more branching corals than nonaggressive groups, and experimentally outplanted branching corals experienced 80% less skeletal loss and grew larger over 25 weeks in aggressive territories than in nonaggressive territories. These findings hint that factors that increase farmerfish group aggressiveness (e.g., higher temperatures) could enhance the protective value of farmerfish territories for the replenishment of coral populations.
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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) | 0.002 | 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 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".