Fecal testosterone in bighorn sheep (<i>Ovis canadensis</i>): behavioural and endocrine correlates
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Noninvasive endocrine techniques allow repeated sampling of the same individual to study causes and consequences of variation in individual behaviour and physiology. In this study, radioimmunoassay was used to measure fecal testosterone and to assess the repeatability of the testosterone assay for bighorn rams (Ovis canadensis). Fecal samples were collected from marked males during the pre-rut and the rut over 2 years. Results were highly repeatable for samples of the same ram within a day (r = 0.93). Fecal testosterone peaked during the pre-rut (when social relationships are established) and then declined from the pre-rut to the rut. For both years of study, fecal testosterone was correlated with social rank (2001: r = 0.73, P < 0.0001; 2002: r = 0.54, P = 0.007) and age (2001: r = 0.65, P = 0.002; 2002: r = 0.53, P = 0.008) of individual rams. When age was accounted for, however, the relationship between social rank and testosterone was no longer significant. Aggressiveness (measured as hourly interaction rate) was weakly correlated with fecal testosterone (r = 0.44, P = 0.039). There was no association between aggressiveness and social rank (r = 0.13, P = 0.591). To our knowledge, this is the first report of an association between testosterone levels and individual social rank in wild ungulates.
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 | 0.001 | 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 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".