Killing technique of North American badgers preying on Richardson's ground squirrels
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Carcasses of 13 Richardson's ground squirrels (Spermophilus richardsonii) cached during autumn by North American badgers (Taxidea taxus) in southern Alberta, Canada, were inspected to determine the capture and killing technique. Regardless of prey size (251651 g) or torpor status (normothermic or torpid), badgers killed ground squirrels with a single grasping bite directed dorsally or laterally to the thorax. The canines and third upper incisors of badgers generally bruised the skin without puncturing it, but caused extensive hematomas on the thoracic musculature and penetrated between the ribs, with associated breakage of ribs and hemorrhaging in the thoracic cavity. Internal organs and bones other than ribs were usually not damaged. Thoracic bites, rather than nape or throat bites, are used by several mustelids, including North American badgers, when capturing small prey (<10% of the predator's mass).
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".