Acoustic communication and environmental factors drive coordinated digging behaviour during an early life stage transition of a freshwater turtle
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Acoustic communication is widespread in the animal kingdom and often fundamental to early life survival. Extant archosaurs, birds and crocodilians display complex vocalizations in early life that function in parental care and embryo communication. Turtles are a sister group to archosaurs and vocalize, but they lack parental care, providing an opportunity to decouple parental care from other factors driving the evolution of neonatal communication. Turtle hatchlings produce vocalizations in the subterranean nest before emergence, but their function remains unclear. We hypothesized that acoustic cues may facilitate emergence from the nest by cueing hatchlings to begin digging out of the subterranean nest cavity. We test whether hatchling vocalizations are positively associated with digging activity in hatchling snapping turtles ( Chelydra serpentina ). In two successive years, we monitored subterranean hatchling behaviour in situ with acoustic recorders in seminatural turtle nests. Structural equation modelling revealed that vocalization was causally associated with hatchling movement. Our findings support a hypothesis that early-life acoustic communication coordinates a social activity in the absence of parental care, a function with relatively few described parallels in the animal kingdom.
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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".