Exploring the potency and replenishment of woodfrog disturbance cues, a nonspecific communication system in aquatic species
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Disturbance cues are chemicals released by disturbed but uninjured prey. These cues elicit increased vigilance when detected by conspecifics, similar to the better-known damaged-released alarm cues. Many studies on predation risk expose prey to cues from whole-body homogenates as an indicator of predation risk. Such homogenates are known to contain alarm cues but presumably also contain disturbance cues, although their contribution to responses elicited by homogenates is unstudied. Here, we first attempted to quantify the relative contribution of disturbance cues to the behavioural response to whole-body homogenates, by exposing larval woodfrogs, Lithobates sylvaticus , to homogenates from conspecifics that were either undisturbed (contained disturbance cues), or that just received a disturbance from a simulated predator chase (which presumably depleted disturbance cues). Both sets of homogenates elicited similar antipredator behaviour (reduced activity) in receivers, suggesting that disturbance cues either made little contribution to the responses or were not depleted by the chase. Responses to homogenates were also stronger than responses to disturbance cues alone, suggesting that tadpole alarm cues were the primary risk indicator in the homogenates, and that alarm cues are more potent than disturbance cues. Although the chemistry and release mechanisms of disturbance cues remain poorly understood, research suggests they are pulses of nitrogenous waste. Hence, in experiment 2, we investigated the physiological limitation of disturbance cue communication. Disturbance cues were collected after each of two chasing events, separated by either a short (5 min) or long (2 h) time delay, giving tadpoles either a short or long opportunity to replenish their disturbance cues. Unexpectedly, tadpoles maintained their response intensity to disturbance cues after the shorter replenishment period and showed a weakened response after the longer period. These findings indicate that disturbance cues in tadpoles are not immediately depleted by a chasing event and instead may be released slowly. • Disturbance cues are chemicals released from disturbed but uninjured prey. • These cues warn conspecifics of potential danger, triggering antipredator behaviour. • Woodfrogs' responses to disturbance cues were weaker than to whole-body alarm cues. • Disturbance cues were not depleted by a short, simulated predator chase. • Results indicate that woodfrog disturbance cues are released slowly over time.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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".