THERMAL BIOLOGY AND METABOLISM OF THE AMERICAN SHREW-MOLE,<i>NEUROTRICHUS GIBBSII</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The American shrew-mole (Neurotrichus gibbsii) seems to occupy an ecological and evolutionary position intermediate to that of shrews and fully fossorial moles. However, because little is known regarding their physiology, we examined the metabolic rate and thermoregulatory competence of 6 shrew-moles exposed to ambient temperatures ranging from 3 to 34°C with flow-through respirometry. The basal rate of metabolism of N. gibbsii (3.94 ml O2 g−1 h−1; 77.90 J g−1 h−1) was 2.32 times greater than predicted for similar-sized placental mammals and close to that of soricine shrews of comparable mass (10–12 g). Over the entire range of test temperatures, mean body temperature (38.4 ± 0.2°C SE) of this small semiterrestrial talpid was higher and more labile than that of other North American moles but within the range typical for north-temperate soricids. With declining ambient temperatures, shrew-moles exhibited gradual reductions in body temperature and minimal whole-body thermal conductance. In 2 instances, shrew-moles were observed to enter an apparent state of hypometabolism. Whether the observed reductions in body temperature and metabolic rate of Neurotrichus exposed to low ambient temperatures are adaptive energy-conservation mechanisms exhibited during periods of prolonged cool wet weather and food deficits in nature, or simply reflect an inability to proficiently thermoregulate after an extended fast, is currently unknown.
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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) | 0.001 | 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".