Patterns in Food Resource Use by Butterflies in an Experimental Macrocosm
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As adults, some butterflies can feed on a variety of nectar plants and are considered generalists, while other species feed on or show preferences for a limited number of food sources. In butterfly houses, butterflies provisioned with sufficient nectar are expected to live longer and have better health. The Montreal Insectarium Grand Vivarium (MIGV) was used as an experimental macrocosm to study the feeding preferences of 21 butterfly species. We ask the question ‘Do the butterflies of the MIGV show feeding preferences?’ We measured niche breadth in terms of feeding and explored associations between butterfly species and natural and artificial nectar sources. Our results show that some butterflies in the MIGV are generalists, visiting up to eight plant species, while others feed only on one or a few. On the other hand, no plant species was visited by all butterfly species. Some flowers were visited by up to 12 species of butterflies, while others by only a few. Some heliconiine species displayed feeding behavior known to occur in the wild. Together, these results contribute to a better understanding of butterfly ecology in controlled environments and highlight the importance of diverse nectar resources for butterfly welfare in museum settings.
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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".