Evaluating the effects of the invasive cane toad (Rhinella marina) on island biodiversity, focusing on the Philippines
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The negative ecological impacts of invasive species are well documented, although their effects are often more pronounced on islands than on the mainland. This is because many island species exhibit high degrees of endemism, have small geographic distributions, are rare, and exhibit low genetic diversity, which reduces their ability to respond to new emerging threats. One of the world’s most notorious invasive species is the cane toad (Rhinella marina), which is a voracious predator that is native to the neo-tropics but was intentionally introduced in the early 20th century to many warm regions and islands to control crop pests. Cane toads produce two kinds of toxins in neck glands that are often lethal to non-adapted predators in the invasive range. Although well-studied in Australia, their ecological impacts on many islands have received much less attention. Australia is the sixth largest country on Earth, so the effects of cane toads on small island nations may differ considerably from there. Here, we discuss the potential ecological impacts of cane toads in the Philippines and on other island nations. Cane toads were introduced onto the largest Philippine island, Luzon, in 1930 and have since spread over all but a few of the 7641 islands that make up the country. We speculate that, unlike most biological invasions with predators or herbivores where the ecological effects are strictly ‘top-down’, cane toads, by virtue of their biology and ecology, may have even more serious effects on island fauna because they exhibit both ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ effects.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 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".