Moving in the real world: tortoises take the plunge to cross steep steps
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite exhibiting low velocity and limited agility, many tortoises undertake large scale movements and must overcome various obstacles, notably in populations living in hilly or rocky habitats. Although crucial, studies exploring how tortoises move in complex and irregular environments are scarce. In this context, we examined an important behavioural trait: how tortoises (Testudo hermanni) deal with step-like obstacles. In their natural habitat, individuals were positioned in a challenging situation: they were placed on a bench approximately 50 cm high, and were observed over a 10-min period. We compared the behaviour of the tortoises (taking a risk to ‘jump’ or waiting) from two populations living in contrasted habitats: flat versus rugged (crisscrossed by cliffs and rocky steps). Individuals from the flat habitat were reluctant to jump, whereas most tortoises from the rugged habitat jumped. Immature tortoises were less willing to jump compared to larger and more experienced adults. These results suggest that challenging habitats increase boldness. In addition to fundamental findings, these results may have conservation value and assist in improving translocation strategies for endangered tortoise populations.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".