Why do female Columbian ground squirrels (Spermophilus columbianus) give an estrus call?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Female Columbian ground squirrels ( Spermophilus columbianus (Ord, 1815)) sometimes emit a repetitive vocalization after copulation. We examined two possible explanations for why sexual selection would favor expression of these “estrus calls”: to encourage sperm competition through mating with additional males and to increase mate guarding by the consort male as a mechanism of postcopulatory female mate choice. During three annual mating periods, we observed mating behaviour, estrus calls, and postcopulatory behavioural interactions of free-ranging individuals. Predictions of the advertisement hypothesis were supported, as females typically solicited courtship interactions with nonconsort males directly after emitting an estrus call. Thus, females that emitted an estrus call were more likely to acquire additional matings than noncalling females, particularly if calls were emitted after the female’s first mating. These results were not consistent with predictions of the postcopulatory female mate choice hypothesis, as calling females should initiate social contact with the consort male and stay proximate to the copulatory site after copulation if they are encouraging mate guarding. For reasons that remain unclear, the probability that an estrus call would follow mating increased linearly with the age of the consort male. However, our results taken together suggest that estrus advertisement is the most likely social context of female postcopulatory calling.
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 | 0.001 |
| 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) | 0.001 | 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".