Behavioural, morphological, and life history shifts during invasive spread
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Invasive species are common around the world, but we still do not know which traits are most important for successfully establishing in new environments. Different stages of the invasion process, including transport, introduction, establishment, and spread, can act as selective filters for different combinations of phenotypic traits. Theoretical and empirical studies predict that invasive populations should have suites of behaviours that improve dispersal and spread, including higher boldness, dispersal propensity, and activity levels than native populations. In this study, we tested these predictions by comparing the morphology, life history, and behaviour of an invasive populations of redback spiders, Latrodectus hasselti, from Japan to a population of native spiders from Australia, with additional comparisons of another invasive population from New Zealand. We found that both a longer-established invasive New Zealand population and the more recently-established invasive Japanese population were more dispersive than the native Australian population. The Japanese invasive population showed elevated levels of sibling cannibalism relative to the native population, which may increase total reproductive success of females under food limitation. Japanese spiders were also less bold in response to a simulated predator threat compared to the native Australian population. In contrast to the prediction that invasive populations would show uniformly fast life history traits, the invasive Japanese population was more fecund, yet took longer to develop than the native population under laboratory conditions. Overall, our results show that invasive populations are phenotypically distinct from native populations, with some behavioural, life history, and morphological traits that would increase spread (dispersal tendency, high fecundity) and persistence (sibling cannibalism) in new habitats.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
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 it