Physical and social cues shape nest-site preference and prey capture behavior in social spiders
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Animals often face conflicting demands when making movement decisions. To examine the decision process of social animals, we evaluated nest-site preferences of the social spider Stegodyphus dumicola. Colonies engage in collective web building, constructing 3D nests and 2D capture webs on trees and fences. We examined how individuals and groups decide where to construct a nest based on habitat structure and conspecific presence. Individuals had a strong preference for 3D substrates and conspecific presence. Groups were then provided with conflicting options of 3D substrates versus 2D substrates with a conspecific. Groups preferred the 3D structures without presettled conspecifics over a 2D substrate with conspecifics. When a group fragmented and individuals settled on both substrates, the minority group eventually joined the majority. Before rejoining, the collective prey capture behavior of divided groups improved with the size of the majority fragment. The costs of slow responses to prey for split groups and weak conspecific attraction may explain why dispersal is rare in these spiders.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".