Winter huddling groups in the striped mouse
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Huddling is a strategy to avoid heat loss and thus save energy and is often observed in birds and rodents, which, because of their small body size, are prone to relatively high heat loss. Huddling might thus explain group-living in some cases, such as the winter huddling groups described for several northern hemisphere rodents. Here we describe winter huddling groups in an African rodent, the striped mouse ( Rhabdomys pumilio (Sparrman, 1784)), from the Succulent Karoo of South Africa. Striped mice were radio-tracked and observed directly in the field. The importance of huddling in this species was demonstrated by comparing data collected over 2 years. The 2003 winter was characterized by a severe drought and 99% mortality. As a result, close kin were mainly unavailable and striped mice slept in non-kin huddling groups. In 2004, normal winter rainfall occurred, mortality was only 50%, and striped mice formed family groups that shared a nest at night. While family groups were stable in 2004, non-kin huddling groups in 2003 were highly flexible and often changed from night to night. Huddling groups are important for striped mice to save energy, and the instability of non-kin sleeping groups indicates that the potential for conflict is higher between non-kin than between kin and that there is a trade-off between thermoregulatory requirements and kin selection.
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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".