Do a male garter snake's energy stores limit his reproductive effort?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The storage and utilization of energy plays a critical role in reproductive output for females of many species, including snakes. However, links between energy and reproductive effort in males are less clear. Studies at a communal den of red-sided garter snakes (Thamnophis sirtalis parietalis (Say, 1823)) in Manitoba suggest that energy is critical to reproduction for males as well as females. Males vary substantially in body condition (mass relative to body length) at the time they emerge from winter inactivity. The energy to be expended in courtship is stored in the muscles rather than the "conventional" sites for energy storage in snakes (abdominal fat bodies or liver). A male's reproductive effort (the duration of his residency at courting aggregations near the den) was linked to his energy stores and to the rate of depletion of those stores. Male snakes that emerged from hibernation in better condition, and that lost mass slowly thereafter, remained in courting aggregations near the den for longer periods than did males that emerged in poor condition (i.e., with less energy resources) and (or) lost mass more rapidly. In outdoor arenas, males that engaged in courtship lost mass more rapidly than did males with no courtship opportunities. These data suggest that courtship is energetically expensive for male garter snakes and that the amount of effort that a male invests in reproduction is determined by his energy stores.
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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) | 0.013 | 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".