Feeding ecology of the Great Basin Rattlesnake (Crotalus lutosus, Viperidae)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Documenting variation in organismal traits is essential to understanding the ecology of natural populations. We relied on stomach contents of preserved specimens and literature records to assess ontogenetic, intersexual, temporal, and geographic variations in the feeding ecology of the North American Great Basin Rattlesnake ( Crotalus lutosus Klauber, 1930). Snakes preyed mainly on rodents, occasionally on lizards, and less frequently on birds; squamate eggs and frogs were rarely eaten. There was a positive relationship between predator and prey size. The best predictors of this relationship were prey diameter as a function of snake body length and head size, underscoring the importance of prey diameter for gape-limited predators such as snakes. Crotalus lutosus displayed ontogenetic, sexual, and seasonal variations in diet. Smaller rattlesnakes fed predominantly on lizards, whereas larger individuals mostly fed on mammals. Females fed on lizards more often than males. The proportion of mammals in the diet was highest during the summer, a temporal variation that may be related to behavioral shifts in the diel activity and prey selectivity of C. lutosus, and (or) to differential abundance of rodents between seasons. Great Basin Rattlesnakes also displayed geographic variation in feeding habits, with snakes from the Great Basin Desert eating a higher proportion of lizards than serpents from the more northern Columbia Plateau.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".