Does city life reduce neophobia? A study on wild black-capped chickadees.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract As human populations increase and city borders grow, many animals have to modify foraging behaviors in order to exploit evolutionarily novel urban food sources that could aid their survival. Neophobia, the fear of novelty, can lead to missed opportunities in these cases. Here, we studied the novelty response of wild animals in ecologically relevant conditions while controlling for individual characteristics and potential differences in foraging group size. We predicted that urban black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapillus) would be more likely to initially contact novelty than rural chickadees and that subordinates and juveniles would be more likely to first contact novelty than dominants and adults, respectively. We ran replicated experiments using three novelty types (object, color, or food) on six sites, during which we registered feeder choice of 71 tagged individuals. We found that urban chickadees showed less neophobia than their rural counterparts, the latter having a higher probability of initially contacting the familiar feeder before approaching the novel feeder. There was no significant effect of an individual’s dominance, age, or sex on its first choice of feeder, nor was there any effect of novelty type. Overall, our results suggest that urban chickadees exhibit less neophobia than their rural counterparts because they have generally learned to tolerate novelty in their habitat, they have adapted to live in an environment that rewards low neophobia, and/or they are less reluctant to use feeders at new locations.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".