The effects of terrestrial and breeding densities on corticosterone and testosterone levels in spotted salamanders, <i>Ambystoma maculatum</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We examined plasma concentrations of corticosterone (CORT) and testosterone in male free-living and captive spotted salamanders, Ambystoma maculatum (Shaw, 1802), to determine if (i) they mounted significant CORT responses to conspecifics in captive enclosures during potential competition for limited burrows; (ii) artificially induced, increased breeding densities altered CORT and testosterone levels in a free-living population; and (iii) testosterone in free-living males varied seasonally. We found increased baseline CORT in captive male spotted salamanders exposed to conspecifics under high densities (4 animals with only 1 burrow). Original residents of the cage, however, had significantly higher baseline CORT titers than did newly introduced animals, and titers were significantly higher in animals cohabiting a burrow than those remaining outside the burrow. This suggests that spotted salamanders perceive con specifics as threats for burrows and become stressed when forced to share these resources. In contrast, free-living spotted salamanders during breeding showed no significant increases in baseline CORT or testosterone in high-density treatments. This suggests that increased adult density during breeding is not stressful to these salamanders. Finally, spotted salamanders had greater plasma testosterone titers in fall than in spring, suggesting that they are dissociated breeders.
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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".