A Spark in the Dark: Uncovering Natural Activity Patterns of Mormyrid Weakly Electric Fish
Bibliographic record
Abstract
To understand animal ecology, observation of wildlife in the natural habitat is essential, but particularly challenging in the underwater realm. Weakly electric fishes provide an excellent opportunity to overcome some of these challenges because they generate electric organ discharges (EODs) to sense their environment and to communicate, which can be detected non-invasively. We tracked the EOD and swimming activity of two species of mormyrid weakly electric fishes ( Marcusenius victoriae and Petrocephalus degeni ) over diel cycles in the laboratory, and we recorded EODs and environmental dissolved oxygen (DO) concentration and temperature over several months in a naturally hypoxic habitat in Uganda. Under laboratory conditions, both species showed increases of activity and exploration behavior that were closely synchronized to the onset of the dark phase. In the wild, fish preferred structurally complex habitats during the day, but dispersed toward open areas at night, presumably to forage and interact. Nocturnal increase of movement range coincided with diel declines in DO concentration to extremely low levels. The fact that fish showed pronounced nocturnal activity patterns in the laboratory and in the open areas of their habitat, but not under floating vegetation, indicates that light intensity exerts a direct effect on their activity. We hypothesize that being dark-active and tolerant to hypoxia increases the resistance of these fish against predators. This study establishes a new technology to record EODs in the field and provides a window into the largely unknown behavior of mormyrids in their natural habitat.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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) | 0.000 | 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".