Incubation temperature effects on hatchling growth and metabolic rate in the African spurred tortoise,<i>Geochelone sulcata</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We tested competing hypotheses regarding the persistence of temperature-dependent sex determination (TSD) in the African spurred tortoise (Geochelone sulcata (Miller, 1779)), by measuring the effects of incubation temperature (T inc ) on a suite of physiological and behavioral endpoints, including resting metabolic rate, yolk-to-tissue conversion efficiency, posthatching growth, and temperature preference. Correlations of these variables with T inc could lend support to the hypothesis that TSD persists owing to sex-specific benefits of development at specific temperatures, whereas absence of T inc effects support the null hypothesis that TSD persists simply because selection favoring alternate sex determining mechanisms is weak or absent. The metabolic rate Q 10 value exhibited temporal variation and was higher immediately after hatching compared with 40 or 100 days posthatching, and mass conversion efficiency varied among clutches. Incubation temperature correlated inversely with duration of embryonic development, but did not influence yolk conversion efficiency, growth, or resting metabolic rate. Thus, our results provide little evidence indicating contemporary benefits of TSD, suggesting that TSD in G. sulcata is no longer evolutionarily adaptive but persists because selection against it and in favor of other sex-determining mechanisms is weak, or that TSD is an adaptive trait but for reasons not elucidated by this study.
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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) | 0.000 | 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".