Behavioural responses of wintering porcupines to their heterogeneous thermal environment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many species use behavioural thermoregulation to cope with changes in their thermal environment. Most studies to date, however, have focused either on ectotherms or on endotherms living in warm environments. Here we used heated taxidermic mounts to characterize microclimates available to North American porcupines during the cold Canadian winter. We then examined activity patterns and microhabitat use of wild individuals to test whether porcupines responded behaviourally to changes in thermal conditions. Dens offered good protection against the cold, and porcupines modified their use of dens as thermal conditions became more constraining. They reduced time spent outside of dens, increased the number of activity bouts in a day, and became more diurnal. When outside of dens, they fed more often, but did not change their use of microhabitats as thermal conditions became most constraining. Microhabitats other than dens were less predictable in the protection they offered against cold temperatures. This may be why porcupines based their behavioural thermoregulation strategy on modulating patterns of den use rather than on selecting warmer microclimates when outside of the den. We hypothesize that selection of microhabitats outside of the den was driven by food acquisition or predation risk.
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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) | 0.002 | 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".