Multiple paternity in the western terrestrial garter snake, <i>Thamnophis elegans</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Multiple paternity may be a widespread phenomenon in snakes, but studies to date are inadequate for assessing the effect that phylogeny may have on paternity. Hypothetical mechanisms responsible for polyandry in snakes include intersexual conflicts and avoidance of genetic incompatibilities due to inbreeding. We analysed the offspring of six litters of western terrestrial garter snakes (Thamnophis elegans (Baird and Girard, 1853)) using microsatellite DNA polymorphisms. We directly detected multiple paternity in half of the litters, one of which exhibited triple paternity, and substantial skew of paternal contributions in all multiply sired litters. Females producing multiply sired offspring were heavier postpartum and produced larger litters, suggesting that larger females that invest more in reproduction are more likely to be multiply mated, a result supporting the hypothesis that polyandry is due to intersexual conflict. Continued investigations of paternity patterns within this genus are under way, but if the factors driving polyandry in snakes are to be identified, controlled laboratory crosses are required.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".