The importation, release, establishment, spread, and early impact on prey animals of the red fox <i>Vulpes vulpes</i> in Victoria and adjoining parts of south-eastern Australia
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Based on new evidence (700 records), this paper provides a detailed account of the importation, release, occurrence, establishment, spread, and early impact on prey animals of the red fox, Vulpes vulpes, in Victoria and adjacent parts of south-eastern Australia. Foxes were imported to Victoria on at least nine occasions between 1845 and 1879, mainly for sporting purposes, and were released directly into the wild on at least five occasions between 1845 and 1873. Foxes may also have been bred in captivity, as some were exhibited at agricultural shows in 1869 and 1872. Releases in 1845 near Geelong and in about 1868 and 1871 near Ballarat did not persist. The prevalence of guns in the rural community, together with a culture of shooting animals for sport, and the broadscale deployment of poison to kill dingoes, feral dogs, and rabbits, apparently conspired to restrict the rapid establishment and spread of foxes across Victoria before 1880. The main point of successful establishment was in Werribee district, possibly in about 1874 (but definitely by 1878), and probably by the wealthy Chirnside family of Werribee Park. Foxes became conspicuously numerous between Geelong and Melbourne in 1878-79 and then dispersed. From 1882 foxes were often unbagged at hunt club meets, and some of these were able to elude the hounds of the pack as they gave chase. The increased availability of rabbits and hares, resulting from their earlier release and subsequent ineffectual control mechanisms, presumably favoured the survival and spread of foxes. Foxes were also translocated by some crop growers in an effort to combat rabbits and hares, though this is poorly documented. The dense forests of Gippsland impeded colonisation, so that Victoria was probably not entirely colonised until about 1900. Foxes reached the Adelaide district of South Australia in 1905 and the Queensland/ New South Wales border in 1907. Unintended consequences of the introduction of foxes were soon observed: killing of lambs and poultry by 1868; native birds by 1879; and native mammals by c. 1900.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it