Eurasian beavers (<i>Castor fiber</i>) behavioral response to simulated territorial intruders
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Eurasian beavers (Castor fiber) live in family groups that defend territories against other conspecifics. Part of this territorial defence involves constructing scent mounds near the stream bank within territories and marking them with castoreum, a urine-based fluid from the castor sacs, and (or) anal-gland secretion. The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that Eurasian beavers show one or more forms of territorial behavior when an intruder, simulated in the form of experimental scent mounds (ESMs), has scent-marked inside the territory. We predicted that beavers would show a stronger response to ESMs with castoreum than to those without. Results showed that 85% of all beaver families (N = 20) made one or more behavioral responses to ESMs marked with castoreum from foreign adult males, whereas no ESMs presented without castoreum received a response. We therefore conclude that a main function of territorial marking by beavers is to advertise spatially related dominance status, thereby providing opportunities for intruders to assess the presence of the owner and reducing the cost and risks of agonistic conflict for both the owner and intruders. Additionally, it appears to be the scent emitted from an ESM and not the sight of it to which beavers respond.
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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) | 0.017 | 0.001 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".