Reproductive behavior of the blind mole-rat (<i>Spalax ehrenbergi</i>) in a seminatural burrow system
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The blind mole-rat (Spalax ehrenbergi) is a fossorial mammal that is solitary and highly aggressive in nature. The consequent difficulties of maintaining this species in captivity have hindered attempts to gain insight into its behavior and reproductive biology. This article describes an innovative artificial tunnel system and management protocol that facilitated our study of the reproductive behavior of the blind mole-rat in captivity. The study employed a naturalistic approach that allowed the animals to establish separate territories in a seminatural tunnel system and to become familiar with each other over a period of months. This approach contrasts with previous unsuccessful attempts in which mole-rats were introduced without a period of acclimation to each other or to the experimental set-up. The results reveal that both the length of acquaintance between a pair of mole-rats and their own control of the timing of encounters are the most significant factors in reducing aggression and stress. Courtship in blind mole-rats is a lengthy process during which the animals gradually become accustomed to one another, which leads to a reduction of aggression and the initiation of positive "contact movements," eventually enabling copulation to occur. Minimal disturbance by the researcher and initiation of encounters by the mole-rats themselves appear to be the factors that led to a successful mating, pregnancy, and, 34 days later, to the female giving birth and rearing the pups in captivity.
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 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) | 0.001 | 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 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".