Lack of behavioral responses of moose (Alces alces) to high ambient temperatures near the southern periphery of their range
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although fundamental factors limiting geographic ranges are understood for many animal species, there is less certainty regarding how such factors influence the behavior of individuals near distributional edges. We tested the hypothesis that climate limits the southern distribution of moose ( Alces alces (L., 1758)) by documenting space use and behavior of 36 females at the margin of the species’ range in Ontario, Canada. We assessed temperature differences among habitats and related changes in seasonal habitat use and daily movement patterns in response to temperature. Ambient temperatures frequently exceeded the thresholds of –5 °C (winter) and 14 °C (summer), above which moose are supposed to be thermally stressed. We detected no differences in habitat use relative to thermoregulation thresholds. However, moose exhibited reduced movement when snow was deep and were more active at dawn and dusk. Low variability in temperature among habitat types implied that functional thermal shelters were absent. We suggest that moose in their southern range either ameliorate heat stress at a finer resolution than we measured or are more resilient to temperature than previously thought. Additional evidence linking temperatures with negative responses is necessary before the prevalent hypothesis of heat stress limiting the southern distribution of moose can be fully assessed.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 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".