Female mimicry in garter snakes: behavioural tactics of "she-males" and the males that court them
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Red-sided garter snakes (Thamnophis sirtalis parietalis) in central Manitoba court and mate in early spring soon after emerging from communal overwintering dens. Some males ("she-males") produce female-like skin pheromones, and hence attract courtship from other males. Studies at a den near Inwood, Manitoba, support and extend results from work at other dens. She-males were males that had recently emerged from hibernation and had not yet regained full locomotor capacity or muscle strength. She-males resembled "he-males" rather than females in their antipredator responses, including the thermal threshold at which they fled from a simulated predator (a plastic crow) rather than remaining stationary and displaying. Males courting she-males were cooler than those courting females; nonetheless they were more likely to flee when we approached them. Compared with courting groups focussed on females, groups around she-males were smaller, consisted predominantly of smaller he-males, and were found over a more restricted time of day (early afternoon). Arena trials confirmed that she-males are disproportionately courted by small rather than large he-males, and clarified other aspects of she-male attractiveness and behaviour. She-males attracted more intense courtship when large females were absent. She-males courted less vigorously when large he-males were present, especially when they were vigorously courted themselves. Overall, our data reveal hitherto-unsuspected complexity in the behavioural tactics of reproducing garter snakes.
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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".