Tropical plant–hummingbird interactions withstand short‐term experimental removal of a common flowering plant
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Theory suggests that species loss can trigger a coextinction cascade within a community, leading to declines in ecosystem function. However, experiments testing this prediction for plant–pollinator interactions remain uncommon. In this study, we simulated the local extinction of a hummingbird‐pollinated understory plant, Heliconia tortuosa , from tropical forest fragments using a replicated before‐after‐control‐impact (BACI) design while quantifying hummingbird abundance and space use (383 hummingbird captures and 36 radio‐tagged individuals), flower visitation rates (> 19 000 observation hours), and pollination success (529 flowers). We expected that H. tortuosa removal would either result in 1) coextinction, in which hummingbirds vacate fragments and compromise the reproductive success of the remaining flowering plants, or 2) increased hummingbird reliance on alternative floral resources, leading to sustained fragment use (persistence). In our experiment, hummingbird behavior and plant–hummingbird interactions were remarkably resistant to loss of H. tortuosa , a locally common plant species representing at least 30–40% of the available nectar resources on average. However, we did not discover evidence that hummingbirds increasingly used alternative floral resources to cope with this temporary resource loss. With the important caution that short‐term experiments may not emulate natural extinction processes, our study suggests that plant–pollinator interactions may be able to withstand single‐species plant losses, but the exact mechanisms enabling hummingbird persistence after resource removal require further research.
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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".