Plasticity and habitat choice match colour to function in an ambush bug
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Individuals aim to maximize their fitness by matching their own phenotype to the optimum phenotype in their environment. Individuals can achieve matching through several mechanisms including habitat choice and adaptive plasticity. A key trait of interest to biologists is colour, with background matching reciprocally camouflaging predators and prey. However, the multiple mechanisms matching an individual's colour to their background, and its consequences for function (e.g. species interactions), are rarely explored simultaneously. Here we investigate colour variation in ambush bugs, Phymata americana , that feed on insects visiting white and yellow flowers. We conducted surveys of wild populations to establish phenotype–environment matching and its effects on prey capture, then performed habitat choice and plasticity (colour change) trials to test for the mechanisms underlying putative patterns of habitat matching. Ambush bugs matched their background—yellower ambush bugs were found on yellow flowers and whiter ambush bugs on white flowers, and matching increased prey capture. This pattern was seemingly driven by a combination of plasticity and habitat choice. Our study highlights how organisms can optimize trait values through a combination of plasticity and habitat choice with tangible effects on individual performance. We suggest that multiple mechanisms interactively shape phenotypes, optimizing function and fitness in the wild. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.
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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) | 0.000 | 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".