Practice does not make perfect: Juvenile object play does not improve the predation skills of adult mink in “simulated prey” tests
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In carnivores, juvenile object play is hypothesized to improve the development of adult predation ability. We tested this hypothesis in a model carnivore, the American mink (Neovison vison). Play was induced via the provision of diverse "enrichment" objects to 32 litters from 4 to 15 weeks of age on a rotating schedule; control mink (32 litters) were instead provided with one static object. Behavioral observations confirmed that enriched juveniles engaged in more object play than control juveniles (p < .01). Tenacity, strength, and chasing motivations were assessed in 52 mink at 27-29 weeks of age using five "simulated prey" tests. These tests showed internal consistency, with measures from the same test being weakly to very strongly correlated (r or ρ: |.33-.95|). Across tests assessing similar skills, some measures of tenacity and strength were also moderately correlated. Treatment had little effect, however, other than on maximum force during vertical pulling, in which control mink unexpectedly scored higher (1.01 ± 0.06 kg vs. 0.84 ± 0.06 kg, p = .0458). Although we did not find evidence to support the hypothesis that object play leads to improved predatory skills, the tests developed have the potential to be used in humane, prey-free future investigations of predation abilities.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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) | 0.001 | 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".