The moon’s influence on the activity of tropical forest mammals
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Changes in lunar illumination alter the balance of risks and opportunities for animals at night, influencing activity patterns and species interactions. Our knowledge about behavioral responses to moonlight is incomplete, yet it can serve to assess and predict how species respond to environmental changes such as light pollution or loss of canopy cover. As a baseline, we wish to examine if and how wildlife responds to the lunar cycle in some of the darkest places inhabited by terrestrial mammals: the floors of tropical forests. We quantified the prevalence and direction of activity responses to the moon in tropical forest mammal communities. Using custom Bayesian multinomial logistic regression models, we analyzed long-term camera trapping data on 88 mammal species from 17 protected forests on three continents. We also tested the hypothesis that nocturnal species are more prone to avoiding moonlight, as well as quantified diel activity shifts in response to moonlight. We found that, apparent avoidance of moonlight (lunar phobia, 16% of species) is more common than apparent attraction (lunar philia, 3% of species). The three species exhibiting lunar philia followed diurnal or diurnal-crepuscular activity patterns. Lunar phobia, detected in 14 species, is more pronounced with higher degree of nocturnality, and is disproportionately common among rodents. Strongly lunar phobic species were less active during moonlit nights, which in most cases also decreases their total daily activity. Our findings indicate that moonlight influences animal behavior even beneath the forest canopy. This suggests that such impacts may be exacerbated in degraded and fragmented forests. Additionally, the effect of artificial light on wild communities is becoming increasingly apparent. Our study offers empirical data from protected tropical forests as a baseline for comparison with more disturbed areas, together with a robust approach for detecting activity shifts in response to environmental change. Open Research statement: The data and code for performing the analyses described in this article are available at https://github.com/richbi/TropicalMoon .
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".