Acoustically mediated risk assessment of eastern tent caterpillars (Malacosoma americanum)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Research on acoustic defense strategies of caterpillars is lacking. Most known lepidopteran larvae have limited vision and live on a substrate during their larval span. Thus, sounds and/or vibrations of predators could have important roles in risk assessment. This thesis investigated acoustically mediated risk assessment in Eastern tent caterpillars, Malacosoma americanum, which live in colonies on silk tents. Malacosoma americanum responded to acoustic stimuli primarily by flicking, and were most sensitive to low frequency (100-500 Hz) sounds, and sounds and vibrations of certain predators/parasitoids. These results support the hypotheses that tent caterpillars assess risk and respond to acoustic stimuli that they may receive through airborne/vibration borne stimuli. A preliminary study tested the possibility that caterpillars on the tent communicate using vibrations to possibly coordinate group displays. This thesis provides novel insights into the importance of acoustics in caterpillar risk assessment, expanding our understanding of this common forest pest’s sensory world.
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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) | 0.001 | 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) | 0.003 | 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".