Ontogeny of food‐caching site preferences in young Florida Scrub‐Jays: evidence of learning or changing social status?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Florida Scrub-Jays (Aphelocoma coerulescens) are cooperative breeders endemic to Florida’s oak scrub. In autumn, Florida Scrub-Jays cache thousands of acorns and exhibit behaviors that appear to balance cache site selection against food degradation or cache robbery. However, both experience and position within a social dominance hierarchy could affect individual cache preferences. We examined the cache site preferences of birds with differing levels of caching experience and at different strata within a complex social dominance hierarchy. Our objective was to determine how experience, social position, and social context when caching influenced microhabitat preferences, and if these change as jays age, gain experience, and their social position changes. Naïve first-year birds preferred to cache in well-hidden, densely vegetated sites with relatively high soil moisture content. Naïve birds also cached farther from provisioning points if observed by a socially dominant bird than when they were alone or in the presence of birds of equal social status. Experienced adults preferred to cache in open, dry sandy sites and social context at the time of caching did not influence their preferences. As naïve birds aged, they gained experience and their social position changed. Experienced second-year birds shifted their preference to more open, drier sites, and did so more often when they remained subordinate within their group rather than becoming dominant breeders. Second-year birds that remained subordinate did not alter their caching behavior if observed by dominant birds. These patterns suggest that after gaining experience, jays learned which sites were more appropriate for caching and shifted their preference, regardless of their changing social status. We suggest that the risk of cache loss to food degradation might be greater than the risk of pilfering for Florida Scrub-Jays, especially for birds in any social strata except the most subordinate, but this requires additional study.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".