Seasonal Diet and Foraging Preference of Greater Kudu Tragelaphus Strepsiceros in the Llano Uplift of Texas
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The greater kudu Tragelaphus strepsiceros, a large African herbivore, occupies the browser trophic niche. This species has been introduced into selected areas of Texas inhabited by the white-tailed deer Odocoileus virginianus, a native browser. Based on similar trophic function, potential interspecific competition could exist between these two species. The objectives of our study were to: 1) describe the seasonal diets of greater kudu in Texas and 2) determine if greater kudu show preference for plants that might create competition with white-tailed deer. We documented the seasonal diet and forage preference of greater kudu at Mason Mountain Wildlife Management Area from 15 May 2001 to 25 February 2002 by identifying epidermal fragments of plants in faecal pellets. We identified and quantified 49 species of plants eaten by greater kudu. Annually, browse made up 80.2% of the diet, while 7.6% mast, 6.5% grasses, 3% forbs and 2.7% unidentified material comprised the remaining parts of their diet. Important browse species included Texas/blackjack oak Quercus buckleyi/Q. marilandica, plateau live oak Q. fusiformis, Ashe juniper Juniperus ashei, mesquite Prosopis glandulosa, prickly pear Opuntia sp., flameleaf sumac Rhus lanceolata, and Texas persimmon Diospyros texana. We measured availability of forage plants by quadrat and line intercept methods concurrent with faecal pellet collection. We compared plant use (dietary composition) with plant availability and assessed forage preference by greater kudu using log-likelihood χ2-tests with Bonferroni corrected confidence intervals and Manly's alpha indices. We detected statistically significant differences between plant use and availability (P < 0.05). Purple horsemint Monarda citriodora, Canada wildrye Elymus canadensis, mesquite, flameleaf sumac, Texas/blackjack oak and Ashe juniper were preferred species. Relative preference of general forage categories by greater kudu in Texas was similar to that reported from Africa. Based on our findings, greater kudu could compete with white-tailed deer for browse forage.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 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".