Temporal dynamics of emergence and dispersal of garter snakes from a communal den in Manitoba
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although garter snakes at communal overwintering dens on the Canadian prairies have attracted considerable behavioural ecology research, previous studies have relied upon sampling of active animals to describe broad patterns of distribution and abundance of snakes within the den population. We conducted a mark–recapture study to directly quantify temporal and spatial variation in the phenotypic traits (sex, size, body condition) of snakes at the den itself, and those dispersing through woodland 50 m away. Captures of 909 snakes on the days they emerged, and 6653 snakes as they dispersed, revealed massive spatiotemporal heterogeneity in phenotypic traits among samples. Day-to-day variation in weather conditions affected numbers and sex ratios of emerging and dispersing snakes; for example, small females dispersed in greater numbers after unusually cold nights, when harassment by courting males was reduced. Most snakes stayed at the den only briefly (<5 days) prior to dispersal, so that sampling at the den itself (the only evidence available from most previous studies) underestimates the number of animals in the population, as well as the proportions of females, of small adult males and of juvenile animals. Overall, the heterogeneous and temporally dynamic distributions of phenotypic traits (such as sex and size) among our samples are predictable on the basis of the central roles of male–male competition and sexual conflict in the mating system of these snakes. Surprisingly, however, many of the snakes that overwinter at this den play no part in den-based breeding aggregations
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 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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".