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.
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".