Plasticity in the antipredator behavior of the orange-footed sea cucumber under shifting hydrodynamic forces
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Marine invertebrates that move too slowly to evade unfavorable environmental change may instead exhibit phenotypic plasticity, allowing them to adjust to varying conditions. The orange-footed sea cucumber Cucumaria frondosa is a slow-moving suspension feeder that is preyed on by the purple sunstar Solaster endeca. The sea cucumber’s antipredator behavior involves changing shape and detaching from the substratum, which might increase its probability of being displaced by water motion into an unsuitable environment. We hypothesized that sea cucumbers’ antipredator responses would be diminished under stronger hydrodynamic forces, and that behavioral strategies would be flexible so that individuals could adjust to frequent changes in water flows. In a natural orange-footed sea cucumber habitat, individuals lived along a pronounced hydrodynamic gradient, allowing us to measure antipredator behavior under different water flow strengths. We placed purple sunstars in physical contact with sea cucumbers living at various points along the gradient to elicit antipredator responses. We then repeated this procedure in a laboratory mesocosm that generated weak and strong hydrodynamic forces similar to those observed at the field site. Subjects in the mesocosm experiment were tested in both wave conditions to determine if their antipredator behavior would change in response to sudden environmental change, as would be experienced under deteriorating sea conditions. Antipredator responses did not covary with hydrodynamic forces in the field. However, antipredator responses in the mesocosm experiment increased when individuals were transplanted from strong to weak forces and decreased when transplanted from weak to strong forces. Overall, our results indicate environmentally induced plasticity in the antipredator behavior of the orange-footed sea cucumber.
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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 | 0.001 | 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".