Individual differences in the behavioural responses of meadow voles to an unfamiliar environment are not correlated with variation in resting metabolic rate
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Resting metabolic rate (RMR) is highly variable between individuals within a single species and the relationship between body mass and RMR does not wholly explain this variability. One factor that could account for a portion of the residual variation is animal personality or consistent individual differences (CIDs) in behaviour, but no study has examined this relationship in a free-living population of mammals. In this paper, we test for a relationship between RMR and CIDs in activity in live-trapped meadow voles Microtus pennsylvanicus after controlling for the effect of body mass. We quantified the activity levels of voles both in an unfamiliar environment and for the first 2 min in the metabolic apparatus, and then measured RMR using open-flow respirometry. As expected, there was a linear relationship between RMR and body mass, and we found strong evidence for repeatable differences in activity levels between individuals. However, contrary to the hypothesis, we did not identify a significant correlation between CIDs in behaviour and RMR after controlling for body mass. Our results suggest that, at least within species, higher activity levels may not require a greater investment in energetically demanding tissues or increased capacity for processing of energy. Alternatively, if a relationship exists, our inability to detect it may reflect a weak behavioural signal in noisy RMR data that are influenced by many factors. Our results could also reflect an artefact of individual responses to stress or a sampling bias towards more exploratory individuals in animals captured by live-trapping.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 | 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".