Intense interspecific amplexus of woodfrogs, Lithobates sylvaticus , on a tiger salamander, Ambystoma tigrinum
Bibliographic record
Abstract
explosive breeding period during either the late winter or early spring. Adults often form large aggregations at temporary ponds, and mate competition is fierce among males that are attempting to amplect females. Sometimes mating balls (i.e., several males amplecting a female simultaneously) can be so intense that they result in death for females (e.g., Phillips and Wade,1990). In general, amplexus occurs only among closely-related species, but occasionally, interspecific amplexus has been observed in ranid frogs (e.g., Pearl, et al.,2005). In the late afternoon of 7 May 2013 at a site in Strathcona County, Alberta, Canada (53.484571°N, 113.151671°W, WPS 84), we found five male wood frogs (about 40 mm snout-vent length) amplecting a reproductive adult tiger salamander, Ambystoma tigrinum, that initially was not moving and appeared dead or in lethargy. As we lifted the salamander (85 mm snout-vent length, 75 mm tail length), two of the frogs jumped back into the pond, but the other three individuals continued amplecting the salamander. Two frogs were tightly grasping the salamander around the abdomen, and the third individual held the salamander around the neck (Fig. 1). We carefully dislodged the frogs in a bucket and released them in the pond. The salamander proved to be still alive, thus in lethargy when amplected, and was also released at the pond. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of woodfrogs amplecting A. tigrinum.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".