A case of a Pustulated Carrion Beetle (<i>Nicrophorus pustulatus</i>, Coleoptera: Silphidae) burying live Tree Swallow (<i>Tachycineta bicolor</i>, Passeriformes: Hirundinidae) nestlings under the nest
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The ecology of Pustulated Burying Beetle (Nicrophorus pustulatus, Coleoptera: Silphidae) appears distinct among Nicrophorus species, with evidence of it parasitizing snake eggs and foraging primarily above the ground and into the forest canopy. Here we document an extension of its aberrant ecology and behaviour: a case of N. pustulatus burying 2-day-old live and dead nestlings of Tree Swallow (Tachycineta bicolor, Passeriformes: Hirundinidae) under the nest, behaviour consistent with the early stages of breeding in N. pustulatus. Based on different levels of decomposition, we suspect that N. pustulatus responded to one dead swallow nestling in the brood of five and went on to bury all of the nestlings at the bottom of the nest box. The observation provides the first evidence, to our knowledge, of Nicrophorus burying live vertebrates.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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; 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".