Venom injection by rattlesnakes (<i>Crotalus atrox</i>): peripheral resistance and the pressure-balance hypothesis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Differential venom injection by snakes, between two size classes of prey for example, has typically been explained within the rubric of the venom-metering hypothesis, which claims that snakes decide how much venom to inject in a given strike. Recently, an alternative, the pressure-balance hypothesis, was advanced, which attributes differential venom flow to the balance of internal forces acting at the venom gland and venom chambers and external forces acting at the exit orifice of the fang. This study tests these competing hypotheses. High-speed digital videos of predatory and defensive strikes by western diamondback rattlesnakes, Crotalus atrox, revealed considerable variation in the trajectory of the fang relative to the target, which would yield wounds with potentially different levels of peripheral resistance. The importance of peripheral resistance was also suggested by the expulsion of venom from the fang after withdrawal from the target (in 7% of strikes) and by the forceful ejection of fluid from the target around the embedded fang (in 2.8% of strikes). Experimental milking chambers were constructed that exposed the right and left venom-delivery systems to different levels of peripheral resistance; with increased peripheral resistance significantly less venom was injected into the chamber and significantly more venom was released on the chamber's surface.
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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".