Persistence of <scp>N</scp>orthern <scp>P</scp>acific <scp>R</scp>attlesnakes masks the impact of human disturbance on weight and body condition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Species may remain present on developed landscapes over extended periods, suggesting viability, while in reality, populations may be indirectly affected in subtle and significant ways. We investigated indirect effects of human disturbance and habitat development on a population of the threatened N orthern P acific R attlesnake C rotalus oreganus oreganus in B ritish C olumbia, C anada. We used mark‐recapture ( n = 623 males and non‐gravid females, 2002–2011) and radio‐telemetry ( n = 100 males, n = 4 non‐gravid females, 2004–2011) to examine weight, length, body condition, ecdysis and exposure risk in habitats of varying disturbance levels. Snakes in the most disturbed areas (<10 m to the nearest source of human activity or development) had lower weights and body condition, and they lost significantly more weight during the active season. Mean body condition of all snakes was stable or even increasing up to 2008 whereafter declines occurred in all categories, but particularly so for animals using disturbed habitat. Although there was some indication that ecdysis rates were affected by disturbance, we found no evidence that animals in disturbed habitat tended to be more exposed (i.e. distant from cover). Our findings indicate that there are consequences of occupying disturbed habitats, even though outward changes in behaviour or declines in density on the landscape are not detected.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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) | 0.000 | 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".