Sex‐based differences in density‐dependent sociality: an experiment with a gregarious ungulate
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For animals living in natural or semi-natural settings, empirical data on how sociality changes in response to increasing population density are few, especially with respect to true conspecific density and not group size. However, insight into this line of research may be far-reaching--from understanding density dependence in sexual selection to improving models of disease transmission. Using elk (Cervus elaphus Linnaeus) held in enclosures, we conducted sex-stratified experiments to test how the frequency of dyadic pairings (interaction rate) and their quality (duration) responded to manipulations in exposure to density. Using proximity-logging radio collars we recorded when and for how long individuals shared a space within 1.4 m of each other. As predicted, males increased their interaction rate as density increased. Female interaction rates, however, increased initially as density increased but soon declined to become indistinguishable from rates at low density. Females interacted for longer periods at medium densities, whereas male interaction length clearly decreased as density increased. We highlight a sexually dichotomous, density-dependent response in sociality that has yet to be reported. In addition to furthering our understanding of sociobiology (e.g., implications of time constraints presented by density on dyadic interactions), our results have implications for managing communicable disease in gregarious species of livestock and wildlife.
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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) | 0.001 | 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".