A game of patience between predator and prey: waiting for opponent’s action determines successful capture or escape
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When predator and prey animals face each other, preemptive actions by both sides are considered to mediate successful capture or escape. However, in spite of the general presumption, some animals, such as predatory snakes and their frog prey, occasionally remain motionless or move slowly for a while before striking or escaping, respectively. To clarify the possible advantages of this behaviour, we examined interactions between Japanese Four-lined Ratsnakes (Elaphe quadrivirgata (H. Boie, 1826)) and Black-spotted Pond Frogs (Pelophylax nigromaculatus (Hallowell, 1861)), focusing especially on kinematic features of strike behaviour of snakes and flight behaviour of frogs in close quarters. Staged encounter experiments and field observations revealed that counteractions against an opponent’s preemptive actions are effective for both snakes and frogs until a certain distance because they are hardly able to change their trajectories once they initiate strike or escape behaviours. Snakes and frogs also appropriately switched their behaviour from waiting for the opponent’s action to taking preemptive action at this threshold distance. These results suggested the occurrence of a game of patience between snakes and frogs in which they wait for the opponent’s action to achieve effective countermeasures. Our study provides new insights for predicting optimal decision-making by predators and prey and will contribute to a better understanding of their strategies.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".