Multispecies comparisons support a startle response origin for a novel vibrational signal in the cricket tribe Lebinthini
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many animals communicate using call and response signals, but the evolutionary origins of this type of communication are largely unknown. In most cricket species, males sing and females walk or fly to calling males. In the tribe Lebinthini, however, males produce calls that trigger a vibrational reply from females, and males use the substrate vibrations to find the responding female. Here, we assessed two hypotheses regarding the behavioral origin of this multimodal duet in the Lebinthini. We conducted playback experiments and measured behavioral and neuronal responses in multiple related cricket species to assess whether the precursor to the lebinthine duet was (1) a startle response to high-frequency sound or (2) an elaboration of a pre-existing courtship behavior. We found behavioral similarities between the vibrational response of Lebinthini females and the acoustic startle behavior in other gryllid crickets. Specifically, the amplitude of the vibrational reply increases with male song amplitude in Lebinthini, and the magnitude of vibrations produced by two gryllid species when startled with ultrasound also correlates with the stimulus amplitude. Like in-flight startle behavior, the startle vibrations produced by perched crickets are suppressed when low-frequency sound is played simultaneously. We also observed courtship behavior in four gryllid species and found few instances of female vibration. Vibrational signals observed in Gryllus pennsylvanicus females were not correlated with male calls and occurred more frequently in pairs that did not mate after courtship. Combined, accumulating evidence supports the hypothesis that the lebinthine duet more likely evolved from a startle precursor than from courtship behavior.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 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".