Fear of Predators Suppresses Neurogenesis in the Brains of Wild Songbirds
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Synopsis Fear of predation can lead to behavioral changes indicative of an enduring memory of fear, as acknowledged by both ecologists and biomedical scientists studying post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Enduring memories are often linked to suppressed neurogenesis in laboratory rodents as a potential mechanism to prevent the replacement of existing memories. We used predator vocalizations to assess the enduring effects of fear on neurogenesis in a wild songbird, black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapillus), quantifying cell proliferation (PCNA immunoreactivity), and immature neurons (doublecortin immunoreactivity) in both sexes. Seven days after predator cue exposure, we found suppression of hippocampal cell proliferation in males, with no effect in females, and suppression of immature neurons in the avian amygdala (medial ventral arcopallium) in both sexes. Our results are consistent with the hypothesis that animals retained an enduring memory of fear, with potential sex differences in the behavioral and ecological consequences of these enduring neuronal changes. Finding effects indicative of an enduring memory of fear in wild caught animals supports the notion that there may be evolutionarily adaptive value to retaining an enduring, PTSD-like memory.
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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 | 0.001 | 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".