Sentinel behaviour and urban environments: A corvid’s perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
American crows (Corvus brachyrhynchos) are the black-clad rulers of a city’s skies and can be spotted in most North American cities. The abundance of corvids has increased with increasing urbanization, suggesting they benefit from living near humans. Recent literature shows that urbanized species such as the American crow can behaviourally adapt to exploit anthropogenic resources resulting in positive urbanization effects on corvids. While individual-level behavioural adaptations are an active area of research, social behaviour adaptations and their contribution to the success of urbanized species are underexplored. Sentinel behaviour is a social behaviour that could increase a species' survival of group members. Using a scoping review approach, several intrinsic (or internal, e.g. sex or body mass) and extrinsic (or external, e.g. predation risk or anthropogenic noise) factors that can alter the sentinel behaviour of mammal and avian species were identified. Factors that alter an individual’s energetic resources can greatly affect an individual’s ability to perform sentinel behaviour, and factors that increase risk to the individual will increase an individual’s propensity to perform the behaviour. During the summer of 2022, I observed the foraging behaviour of American crows in the presence and absence of a sentinel and in the green and commercial areas of St. Catharines. I found that American crows altered their social foraging behaviour in different urban microenvironments but had fewer significant changes in response to the presence of a sentinel. I found a significant interaction between sentinel presence and generalized environment on the behaviour of foragers, suggesting increased reliance on the sentinel when sentinel behaviour is most effective: in green spaces. My findings highlight the need to consider both intrinsic and extrinsic factors and their interaction when studying social behaviours. My findings highlight the need to continue studying the effects of urbanization on social behaviours. By doing so, future studies could unearth the complex mechanisms behind the evolution of social behaviours and help predict how they could change in an ever-urbanizing future.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".