Microanatomy and bacterial flora of the perineal glands of the North American porcupine
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The perineal glands of the porcupine, Erethizon dorsatum (L., 1758), are sexually dimorphic, paired pockets sprouting osmetrichial hairs. They lie between the anus and urethra, lateral to the midline, amid a sebaceous glandular expanse. In their active state, the glandular pockets secrete an amber substance with a terpenoid odor. When inactive, the glands produce no stain or odor. In males, activation of the glands is associated with fully descended testes. The glandular pockets yield a microbiota (“microflora”) in both their active and inactive states. We hypothesize that the active-state microflora transforms a sebaceous secretion into a pheromonally active product that is disseminated by anal dragging. The glandular microflora was characterized by gas chromatography of bacterial fatty acid methyl esters (GC-FAME) and polymerase chain reaction – denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis (PCR-DGGE) of 16S ribosomal RNA gene fragments of bacteria. PCR-DGGE results showed the resulting bacteria profiles were the same in both sexes, but differed between the active and inactive states. Active-state microfloras were dominated by members of the Actinobacteria and showed greater coefficients of similarity than inactive-state microfloras. The microflora of individual animals changed with time and with secretory state. We argue for a reproductive role for the activated perineal glands.
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 | 0.001 | 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".