Use of Natural Licks by Four Species of Ungulates in Northern British Columbia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Use of licks influences the movements and distribution of ungulates. We recorded attendance patterns, duration of visits to licks, and time spent licking by 4 ungulate species at wet and dry licks to examine possible influences on the timing of use of licks in northern British Columbia, Canada. Within-species licking intensity (based on regressions between time spent licking per visit and duration of visits to licks) was higher for elk (Cervus elaphus) than for moose (Alces alces) at wet licks, and higher for mountain goats (Oreamnos americanus) than for Stone's sheep (Ovis dalli stonei) at dry licks. Lick response variables (duration of visits to licks, time spent licking per visit, and proportion of time spent licking) did not vary significantly among early, mid-, and late summer seasons, but there were species-specific differences in the timing of highest attendance. High use of wet licks by both female and male elk in late May followed vegetation greening at low elevations. Average attendance by female elk was highest in late June, coinciding with high lactation demands. Attendance by moose at wet licks was highest in mid-July, potentially coinciding with other aspects of forage phenology such as increased plant defensive compounds. Attendance by Stone's sheep and mountain goats at dry licks was high in early July, following forage change at high elevations and again in early August, potentially related to the trade-off between lactation demands and predation risk. Across species, consumption of lick soils allows ungulates to improve rumen function and nutrient absorption during the transition to spring and summer forage and to supplement elemental intake by females during the nutritional stress associated with lactation.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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".