Fine-Scale Spatial Organization Reflects Genetic Structure in Sheep
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Preferential spatial associations between related animals have been reported in several species, but whether these relationships extend to fine resolution is largely unknown. Using a novel approach that combined pedigrees and precise geographic locations, we tested the relationship between extremely fine-scale (<3 m) spatial structure and relatedness within a captive flock of domestic female Dorset sheep (Ovis aries). Using GPS, we recorded the spatial distribution of individuals while foraging on summer pasture; we compared this to pair-wise coefficients of relatedness (r) and assessed significance of the patterns using Mantel and partial Mantel tests. Population organization was discernible even at this fine spatial resolution. Closely related ewes, especially full- and half-siblings (r ≥ 0.25), formed closer spatial associations than lesser-related and unrelated pairs. The genetic structuring of the flock provides a potential platform for kin selection and suggests that random population organization may not exist even at the finest spatial scales.
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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) | 0.004 | 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".