Forest or meadow: the consequences of habitat for the condition of female arctic ground squirrels (<i>Urocitellus parryii plesius</i>)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Body condition of animals influences the likelihood of surviving harsh environmental conditions, successfully reproducing, and resisting disease. The sum of these individual components of fitness, in turn, have consequences for the growth and persistence of wildlife populations. Here we compared the body mass and condition of adult female arctic ground squirrels (Urocitellus parryii plesius (Osgood, 1900)), an obligate hibernator, in source and sink habitats. We tested the hypothesis that adult females would be in poorer condition in the boreal forest than in adjacent meadows. We found that, during spring, postpartum females in forests weighed less (405 ± 7 vs. 437 ± 11 g; mean ± SE) and were in poorer condition (mean (±SE) residual of mass over structural size = −11.0 ± 10.2 vs. 20.5 ± 6.1 g) compared with females in meadow-source habitat. However, by the onset of entrance into hibernation in August, forest squirrels had reached parity with meadow squirrels and no difference was found in mass (519 ± 13 vs. 520 ± 15 g; mean ± SE) or condition (residual index = −0.01 ± 0.01 vs. 0.03 ± 0.01; mean ± SE). We suggest that for squirrels in formerly occupied boreal forests, (i) poor spring body condition decreased reproductive success and (ii) achieving compensatory growth, via increased foraging, comes at the costs of higher predation risk. These costs likely contributed to the recent local extinction of arctic ground squirrels in boreal forest habitat.
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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 | 0.003 |
| 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".