Factors influencing the acquisition of rodent carrion by vertebrate scavengers and decomposers
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Vertebrate scavengers and decomposers compete for animal carcasses in all temperate and tropical ecosystems. We examined the influence of carcass size, forest type, and air temperature on the fate of rodent carcasses at the Savannah River Site, South Carolina, USA. Three hundred rodent carcasses were placed at random locations in forested habitats and scavengers were identified using remote photography. Seventeen species of vertebrates removed 104 of 300 (35%) rodent carcasses over a year. Raccoons (Procyon lotor (Linnaeus, 1758)) and Virginia opossums (Didelphis virginiana Kerr, 1792) scavenged most frequently. For scavenged carcasses, the mean time to carcass removal was 2.58 days after placement. Carcass acquisition by scavengers and decomposers was influenced moderately by forest type and carcass size, although ambient air temperature considerably influenced the fate of carcasses. Vertebrates removed fewer carcasses as temperatures increased: only 28 of 144 (19%) carcasses were scavenged when temperatures exceeded 17 °C. The temporal pattern of carcass removal by vertebrates, however, did not vary with temperature. Consistent rates of carcass removal by vertebrates across the year and increased activity by insects during warm weather led to elevated levels of decomposition during summer months. This study confirms the complexity and dynamic nature of competitive relationships among scavengers and decomposers.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 it