The effect of manipulated shading on the colony abundance of two species of ants, <i>Formica aserva</i> and <i>Leptothorax muscorum</i>, in dead wood
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Ants (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) are known to be a thermophilic group with fewer species at higher latitudes. They are ubiquitous in the sub‐boreal forests of west‐central British Columbia (Canada) in the early seral ages of forest succession, nesting almost exclusively in woody debris. Individual species begin to disappear with advancing seral ages as the canopy closes, suggesting the hypothesis that heat gain from insolation is critical to many species. We experimentally manipulated shading of two wood‐nesting ant species – Leptothorax muscorum (Nylander) and Formica aserva Forel – to emulate advancing seral age, in an environment documented to support their normal habitation. Shaded down woody debris (DWD) was found to be ca. 2 °C cooler than unshaded DWD, whereas stumps were ca. 1.5 °C cooler when shaded than when unshaded. We found significantly fewer colonies of both L. muscorum and F. aserva in shaded wood, as compared to unshaded, in a pattern consistent with how each species has been observed to respond to advancing seral age. Temperature monitoring during the experiment indicated that soil was cooler than either stumps or DWD, possibly explaining the absence of soil‐nesting ant species in these forests. The species‐specific differences in ant colony abundance in response to small temperature differences, found in this study, support other research on the significance of temperature in structuring ant assemblages.
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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 | 0.000 | 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".