Territorial defense by coyotes (<i>Canis latrans</i>) in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming: who, how, where, when, and why
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Territorial defense and maintenance are an important facet of the social ecology of most carnivore species. From January 1991 to June 1993, we observed 54 coyotes (Canis latrans) for 2507 h in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, during which we observed 112 instances of territory defense. The identity of the coyotes involved in challenging and evicting intruding animals was known. Alpha coyotes were most likely to be involved in territorial evictions of intruding animals, followed by beta individuals; pups participated little in territory defense. Coyotes evicting intruders generally had a numerical advantage when challenging the intruders. Territory-defense rates were highest during and immediately after the breeding season and during the time of pup emergence from the den. All chases of intruders ended at the boundary of the resident coyote pack's territory. Physical contact between the intruding animal and resident pack members occurred with no intruders being killed or seriously injured. Physical contact consisted of fighting and ritualized behaviors, with only a few instances in which fighting led to blood being drawn or minor injuries to the intruder. Most encounters resulted in a hasty retreat from the area by the intruder(s). While indirect means of territory maintenance (i.e., howling and scent-marking) were utilized by resident packs, trespassing still occurred and direct confrontation was needed to enforce boundaries and assert occupancy against other resident packs, as well as against lone intruders seeking territory vacancies. Territoriality was advantageous in that territory holders generally had higher survival rates (except pups), contributed all the reproductive effort to the population, and had greater access to food resources. In contrast, nonterritorial animals had lower survival rates, did not breed, and had reduced access to food (ungulate carcasses) during winter.
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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) | 0.001 | 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".