Anti‐Predator Behavior of Vancouver Island Marmots: Using Congeners to Evaluate Abilities of a Critically Endangered Mammal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Behavioral comparisons between endangered species and their congeners may provide valuable data with which to test ideas about declining populations or the future direction of recovery efforts. We considered the case of the highly endangered Vancouver Island marmot ( Marmota vancouverensis ). Predation is a current source of mortality, and inadequate anti‐predator behavior could have profound ramifications for the future success of re‐introductions. We tested whether M. vancouverensis anti‐predator behavior was unusual or ‘deficient’ by quantifying it and comparing it to 13 other marmot species. We found no evidence that Vancouver Island marmots were unwary. If anything, the converse was true. Vancouver Island marmots were responsive and vigilant towards real and simulated predatory threats. They dug numerous escape burrows that reduced the likelihood of predation. Our results have several implications for future recovery efforts, one of which was to establish ‘baseline’ flight‐response targets that captive‐bred Vancouver Island marmots will have to meet or exceed prior to release into predator‐rich environments.
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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".