Vigilance and foraging patterns of American elk during the rut in habitats with and without predators
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Animal behavior is often optimized as a trade-off between survival and reproduction. During the breeding season, mammals tend to maximize their reproductive effort within the constraints of predation pressure. When predation pressure is reduced, greater effort can be allocated to reproductive behavior and less to vigilance and predator avoidance. The objective of this study was to test the hypothesis that elk, Cervus elaphus, in Yellowstone National Park (YNP), with predators, would spend more time in vigilance and risk-avoidance behavior than would elk in Rocky Mountain National Park (RMNP), a predator-free environment. We further predicted that elk at Mammoth Hot Springs (MAM) in YNP would behave similarly to those at RMNP because predators were absent in that area of the park. Cow elk in YNP spent more time in vigilance and less in foraging during activity periods than did cows in RMNP or MAM. Also, elk in YNP retreated to forest cover during the midday inactive period, whereas elk in RMNP and MAM remained in open habitat. Vigilance was not correlated with group size at either site. Cows with calves spent more time in vigilance and less in foraging than did cows without calves in RMNP and YNP. Bull elk spent most of their time in courtship at all sites, but foraged more at RMNP than in YNP or MAM. Mean harem sizes were similar among the three sites: 17.0 in RMNP, 15.7 in YNP, and 19.0 in MAM. The proportion of cows with calves was significantly lower in the area with predators, YNP (0.10), than in the predator-free areas (0.24 in RMNP and 0.37 in MAM), probably because of greater calf mortality in YNP. Elk in YNP behaved in accordance with a predation risk, whereas those in RMNP and MAM showed less vigilance behavior.
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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".