Response of passerine birds and chicks to larvae and pupae of ladybirds
Bibliographic record
Abstract
1. Few, if any, experimental tests have demonstrated the anti‐predator protection of the developmental stages of ladybirds (Coleoptera: Coccinellidae) against vertebrates, despite the fact that both the visual appearance of ladybirds and the content of defensive compounds fulfil the definition of an aposematic prey. 2. In this study, avian predators of three species were confronted with fourth‐instar larvae and pupae of the harlequin ladybird ( Harmonia axyridis ) – a large, conspicuous, and toxic ladybird species. 3. The selected predators differed in their individual experience and attitude to ladybirds. Wild‐caught great tits ( Parus major ) strongly avoided attacking ladybirds in general, whereas wild‐caught tree sparrows ( Passer montanus ) were willing to include ladybirds in their diet. Domestic chicks ( Gallus gallus domesticus ) have never been confronted with ladybirds but usually show avoidance of aposematic signals. In this study, great tits and domestic chicks avoided both developmental stages, but in the case of chicks the avoidance had to be learned over the course of repeated encounters. Sparrow avoidance was significantly lower, with more than one‐third of the prey being attacked and eaten. 4. The protection of both developmental stages of ladybirds is similar to adults, despite substantially different visual appearance.
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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 | 0.001 | 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".