New observations on urine contents in water-deprived Negev Desert rodents
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In past studies, several rodent species of the murid subfamilies Gerbillinae and Cricetomyinae from the Namib Desert, when deprived of water, excreted allantoin precipitate in their urine. Shifting nitrogen excretion from urea to allantoin allows them to save much water. This phenomenon has not been reported in other rodents, and whether it is a trait that is common among desert rodents, but undocumented, or is unique to these Namib Desert species, is not known. We found no allantoin precipitate in the urine of any of five additional species of water-deprived murid rodents of two subfamilies from the Negev Desert. There was no discernible precipitate in the urine of Gerbillus andersoni allenbyi (Gerbillinae), Gerbillus pyramidum (Gerbillinae), or Acomys cahirinus (Murinae). Sodium oxalate was found in both the precipitate and the liquid urine of Psammomys obesus (Gerbillinae), and the as yet unidentified precipitate in the urine of Gerbillus dasyurus (Gerbillinae) was not allantoin. This preliminary study suggests that not all gerbilline rodents have the capacity to switch from urea to allantoin excretion. The Namib Desert gerbilline and cricetomyine rodents may be examples of closely related mammalian taxa that have evolved a new metabolic pathway to produce a nitrogenous product that results in sizable water savings, i.e., by switching from urea to allantoin.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".