Why Do Columbian Ground Squirrels Copulate Underground?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Columbian ground squirrels (Spermophilus columbianus) usually copulate underground in a burrow. Underground copulations might be associated with 2 nonexclusive benefits: reducing probability of predation during copulation and reducing interference by conspecific males. We tested whether either of these benefits was involved in determining if the copulation site was underground or aboveground. In 2006 and 2007, we obtained detailed information on the copulatory behavior and social interactions of free-ranging individuals in southwestern Alberta, Canada. During the 3-week annual breeding period, we also recorded the activity of predators of Columbian ground squirrels such as ravens, foxes, and hawks. Squirrels that lived on the periphery of the population were more susceptible to predation than squirrels in the center. Despite this risk, aboveground copulations usually occurred on peripheral territories. In addition, aboveground copulations were not further removed in time from predator attacks or sightings than underground copulations. Copulations that occurred aboveground were sometimes disrupted by previous mates of the estrous female. Probability that copulation would occur aboveground increased when the density of reproductive males around an estrous female was low. Our results suggest that although underground copulations protect individuals from predation, male-male competition for females and interference with copulations have been more important than predation in determining copulatory sites for Columbian ground squirrels in our study population.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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".