Terrestrial invasive species alter marine vertebrate behaviour
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Human-induced environmental changes, such as the introduction of invasive species, are driving declines in the movement of nutrients across ecosystems with negative consequences for ecosystem function. Declines in nutrient inputs could thus have knock-on effects at higher trophic levels and broader ecological scales, yet these interconnections remain relatively unknown. Here we show that a terrestrial invasive species (black rats, Rattus rattus) disrupts a nutrient pathway provided by seabirds, ultimately altering the territorial behaviour of coral reef fish. In a replicated ecosystem-scale natural experiment, we found that reef fish territories were larger and the time invested in aggression lower on reefs adjacent to rat-infested islands compared with rat-free islands. This response reflected changes in the economic defendability of lower-quality resources, with reef fish obtaining less nutritional gain per unit foraging effort adjacent to rat-infested islands with low seabird populations. These results provide a novel insight into how the disruption of nutrient flows by invasive species can affect variation in territorial behaviour. Rat eradication as a conservation strategy therefore has the potential to restore species interactions via territoriality, which can scale up to influence populations and communities at higher ecological levels.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.004 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".