Food Habits of the Plains Garter Snake (Thamnophis radix) at the Northern Limit of Its Range
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The North American genus Thamnophis is a widely distributed and abundant group of snakes. Previous research has indicated that most garter snakes are generalist predators that largely consume anurans, with some degree of geographic and temporal plasticity in response to resource variation. We studied the dietary habits of the Plains Garter Snake, Thamnophis radix, based on stomach contents from 548 animals collected in the field from 1995–2006 at the northern limit of the species' range in central Alberta, Canada. Feeding frequency overall was low (22%) and was highest in spring and early summer. Diet was composed mainly of anurans (85%), especially Wood Frogs (Rana sylvatica) and Boreal Chorus Frogs (Pseudacris maculata), and occasionally invertebrates (10%) and small mammals (5%). Small snakes (<200 mm) began feeding shortly after birth and consumed mainly smaller frogs. Larger snakes ate a wider range of prey sizes and types, but frogs still constituted the majority of prey consumed. Despite sexual size dimorphism, males and females ate prey of the same size and type; however, gravid females contained food less frequently than both males and nongravid females. This study adds to the growing number of dietary studies on T. radix and provides additional evidence for the ecological plasticity of Thamnophis species. Further studies are needed to examine how important these snakes are as components of wetland food chains.
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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) | 0.001 | 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".