Dietary dependence of Williamson’s Sapsucker nestlings on ants associated with dead and decaying wood in British Columbia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Williamson’s Sapsucker (Sphyrapicus thyroideus (Cassin, 1852)) breeds primarily in managed forests in Canada. Its status as endangered will require reliable information to develop habitat management guidelines. Adults provision nestlings with ants gleaned from tree trunks, so we estimated the preferred nestling diet by comparing nestling fecal sac composition with the ant fauna collected in tree trunk traps. For ants, we determined nest densities and substrates by counts along transects within sapsucker nest areas. Ants made up 98% of >10 000 arthropods identified in Williamson’s Sapsucker fecal sacs. Of 11 ant taxa available, Williamson’s Sapsucker consumed six, of which two large-bodied ant taxa, carpenter ants of Camponotus subgenus Camponotus and ants of the Formica rufa species group, were preferred. Together these two taxa averaged 80% of the nestling diet by biomass and formed >48% of the nestling diet at every nest examined (n = 89). Preference varied regionally: west of the Okanagan Valley, only the two large-bodied ant taxa already mentioned were preferred, in the Okanagan–Boundary and East Kootenay regions, smaller bodied ants of the genus Lasius were also preferred, although these comprised ≤5% of the nestling diet by biomass. Camponotus (Camponotus) spp. nests were 3.3 times more common in wood than soil, and the F. rufa species group were entirely dependent on dead or decaying wood for nest substrate. Given the dependence of Williamson’s Sapsucker on these ants, retention and recruitment of dead and decaying wood should be considered a management priority for Williamson’s Sapsucker breeding habitat.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".