Social organization and group formation of raccoons at the edge of their distribution
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We examined spatial and temporal relationships of 104 raccoons (Procyon lotor) at the northern edge of their distribution to report social organization and to test hypotheses regarding the formation of coalition groups among adult male carnivores. Social tolerance among females varied among years, but adults maintained relatively exclusive home ranges (overlap ranged from 2.2% to 12.5%) that were dispersed in a uniform pattern throughout the duration of the study (Clark-Evans ratios ranging from 1.32 to 1.87, P < 0.001–0.08). Social interactions among males were more complex than previously described for low-density populations of raccoons, with most adults (approximately 80%) forming coalition groups. We identified 9 unique coalitions that had extensively overlapping home ranges and positively associated nightly movements within group members (overlap indices ranging from 85.3% to 97.3%). Coalitions maintained exclusive territories between groups (overlap indices ranging from 0% to 3.2%) and formed distinct spatial boundaries that were highly correlated with home-range boundaries of females. Male coalition groups in the order Carnivora are hypothesized to form in response to aggregations of females, but examination of our data suggests that this is not a prerequisite for their formation. We propose a dominance hierarchy where subordinate males benefit through increased likelihood of inheritance of territories, whereas dominant males benefit through increased efficiency of territorial defense.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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) | 0.000 | 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".