Contrasting Patterns of Migration and Habitat Use in Neighboring Rattlesnake Populations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Contrasting movements and habitat use may occur among snakes, and these differences may reflect important local responses to habitat variation and/or signify that broad, unimodal approaches to species conservation are too coarse. Fine-scale differences in these behaviors (e.g., between neighboring conspecifics) may be underappreciated because studies either focus exclusively on one (sub)population, and/or the animals are not compared across relevant ecological boundaries. We report on a striking dichotomy of seasonal migration behavior between Rattlesnakes (Crotalus oreganus) using two neighboring den sites. The snakes at one site undertook long-distance (2.9 ± 0.57 km [mean ± SD], highly directional migratory behavior that was consistent across years and individuals. These movements carried them out of the habitat normally associated with these animals in this region (grassland steppe) and into higher elevation forests, a habitat not previously reported for these animals. Conversely, snakes at another den only 21 km away were nonmigratory (0.97 ± 0.54 km) and remained in grassland habitat throughout the year. Landscape and other environmental factors may have been responsible for the difference in the behavior of these two denning groups, suggesting that our knowledge of what dictates the migratory behavior of animals such as snakes is far from complete. Stereotyping the habitat use and behavior of any snake population is potentially misleading, and more thorough exploration is needed on how these animals alter their local movement patterns in response to changes in landscapes and habitat configurations, including potential climate change effects.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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 | 0.000 | 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".