Dynamic spleen mass in wild and domestic American mink
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The immune system is considered to be an energetically expensive component of an individual's life history. Investment in the immune system can depend on the environment that an individual finds itself in. The American mink, Neovison vison, exists in the natural environment and on fur farms. The natural environment and mink farm differ in many ways, such as wild mink being exposed to many parasites that are less prevalent and less abundant in the domestic environment because of veterinary care. We collected free-ranging mink from commercial trappers and domestic mink from fur farmers in Ontario and Nova Scotia, Canada, and examined relative spleen mass. Wild male mink had larger spleens than domestic mink in Nova Scotia, with a similar trend in Ontario. Female mink that escaped from farms (feral) in Nova Scotia had significantly larger spleens than their domestic counterparts on the farms. Both of these results are consistent with the prediction that the natural environment contains parasites and pathogens that require enhanced investment in the immune system. In Nova Scotia, females had larger spleens than males, whether considering wild or domestic populations. Finally, wild mink showed greater condition dependence of spleen mass than domestic populations. Further investigations should include experimental approaches such as providing veterinary care to wild populations to assess the effects of parasites and pathogens on the immune system.
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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".