Naked mole-rats employ a normoxic escape behaviour that is altered by social interaction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Escape behaviours are a common response when animals encounter hypoxic environments. Confoundingly, naked mole-rats (NMRs) experience hypoxia while sleeping in crowded colony nest chambers, from which escape may not be desirable. In isolation, individual NMRs decrease physical activity to save energy in hypoxia, but this response is absent when conspecifics are present. However, whether NMRs try to escape hypoxia is unknown, as is the impact of sociality on any hypoxic escape behaviours. We predicted that individual NMRs would try to escape from hypoxic environments, but that sociality would reduce the drive to escape. We allowed individual and paired NMRs to choose between normoxia (21% O₂) or various depths of hypoxia (3%, 7% or 11% O₂) and non-invasively recorded their activity. Surprisingly, individual NMRs exhibited a novel normoxic escape behaviour and preferred severe hypoxia (3% O 2 ) to a normoxic environment. This preference was not repeated in less severe levels of hypoxia. Paired animals also preferred a hypoxic environment over normoxia, but social interactions drove an increase in movement velocity and reduced the severity of their preferred level of environmental hypoxia to 7% O 2 . Thus, NMRs choose hypoxic environments over normoxic environments and sociality impacts this behavioural choice in hypoxia.
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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".