Buzzing boundaries: tiny caterpillars vibrate to defend leaf tip territories
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Territorial displays include some of the most elaborate behaviours in the animal kingdom. In this study, we investigated the territorial behaviour and vibratory signalling of neonate warty birch caterpillars (Falcaria bilineata; Lepidoptera: Drepanidae), which reside solitarily on birch leaves and defend the leaf tip. Upon hatching, these tiny caterpillars - no larger than 2 mm - seek out and establish a small solitary territory (∼1 cm wide) at the leaf tip, where they lay silk mats, feed and advertise their presence by producing multicomponent vibratory signals - buzz scrapes and drums. When a conspecific neonate (intruder) is introduced to a leaf occupied by a resident, the resident increases its signalling rate up to four times that when undisturbed, and even more - up to 14 times - if the intruder enters the territory. Intruders rarely manage to take over the resident's defended space, with most confrontations (71%) ending in the resident maintaining control. Residents signal significantly more than intruders at all stages of the contest. If physical contact occurs, residents flee by dropping from the leaf by a silk thread. This results in territorial contests that involve no physical aggression, relying entirely on vibratory communication. These vibratory displays most likely function to establish spacing between conspecifics on a tree branch, but these complex signals may also function to exclude other members of the vibratory community by mimicking something dangerous, such as a jumping spider.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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) | 0.002 | 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".