Selfish herd effects depend on prey crypsis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Determining why some animals form groups while others remain solitary is a longstanding goal in behavioural ecology. Group formation can help mitigate predation risk through various mechanisms, including risk dilution and group vigilance. The selfish herd hypothesis proposes that prey can reduce their risk by minimizing the area around which all points in that area are closer to them than to another conspecific (i.e. by minimizing their ‘domain of danger’ (DOD)). This hypothesis assumes that an individual's predation risk is proportional to the size of its DOD; however, the relationship between risk and proximity to conspecifics may depend on additional factors. Specifically, approaching conspecifics may be costly for prey that rely on crypsis because group formation increases detectability. Using plasticine model prey, we experimentally manipulated prey coloration as well as the DOD, and then tracked their ‘survival’ under natural field conditions. We found that an individual's predation risk increased with their DOD for conspicuous (red) prey, but decreased with the DOD in cryptic (green) prey. Our results are consistent with patterns in natural systems and indicate that the relationship between predation risk and DOD depends on additional factors like prey coloration.
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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) | 0.000 | 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".