An electrical covariance mixture had no clear prediction advantage over a geometry mixture in eight worms

We tested whether electrical wiring adds information for hidden calcium activity prediction beyond covariance learned from other animals. We fitted and tuned models on 40 freely moving C. elegans recordings and froze them before testing eight recordings from a second cohort. Each test hid half the reliably identified cells. The electrical mixture gave mean prediction correlation 0.445434. A model with an expanded activity-only penalty grid gave 0.434262. Their paired difference was 0.011172, with a 95 percent animal-bootstrap interval of 0.006245 to 0.015856. A geometry mixture gave 0.444883. Its difference from the electrical mixture was 0.000551, with an interval of -0.002540 to 0.003866. A chemical mixture also had no clear difference. Thus a small prediction gain did not resolve a benefit specific to electrical wiring. Planned stricter-label, short-window and first-difference checks retained positive gains against the initial empirical grid. Matched penalty and alternative-mixture controls were added after main parameters were frozen, before transfer scores were inspected. The cohorts share one laboratory; anatomy comes from other animals. Static positive kernels, partial labels, fixed masks and conditional intervals limit inference. Original code, aggregate evidence, figures, exact hashes and external retrieval instructions support reproduction. External source records stay outside the bundle.

C. elegans · activity interpolation · gap junctions · connectome · covariance transfer · geometry control · calcium imaging · missing neurons · animal validation