Winter torpor in <i>Helix pomatia</i>: regulated defence mechanism or forced inactivity?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We examined Helix pomatia L., 1758 snails to answer two questions. First, is their winter dormancy facilitated by cold-seeking behaviour, or is it rather a passive phenomenon imposed by cold weather? Second, what thermal conditions are necessary to arouse these snails out of torpor in midwinter and in spring? Snails, collected from natural habitats, were placed in a temperature-gradient apparatus. Their thermal preference was recorded for 48 h under natural photoperiod in early spring, midsummer, and autumn. The autumn recording was continued until the end of November on non-starved and starved snails. Two additional sessions were performed on torpid snails in January (latencies of arousals from torpor at various temperatures and immediate thermal preferences were recorded) and in February (they were kept permanently in darkness at 5 °C and their spontaneous arousals were examined). Temperature selected in spring (23.60 ± 0.15 °C) was significantly lower than that in summer (26.90 ± 0.05; P < 0.05) and in autumn (27.50 ± 0.10 °C; P < 0.01). The prolonged autumn recording did not show cold-seeking behaviour either in non-starved or in starved snails. Threshold temperature inducing midwinter arousals was 10 °C and the aroused snails immediately selected temperatures indistinguishable from those in summer and autumn. Spontaneous arousals from torpor in the snails continuously exposed to cold occurred within a period of arousals in the field. In conclusion, winter torpor of the snails displays unique properties, i.e., its start and maintenance are passive phenomena, while its spring interruption is a precisely controlled, endogenous mechanism.
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 | 0.000 | 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".