A tale of lost tails: pseudoautotomy in the Neotropical snake genus<i>Drymoluber</i>(Serpentes: Colubridae)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Pseudoautotomy (no spontaneous tail breakage without regeneration) occurs in the snakes Drymoluber brazili (Gomes, 1918) and Drymoluber dichrous (Peters, 1863) throughout their geographic range. Examination of 197 specimens of D. dichrous and 60 D. brazili show, respectively, a frequency of tail breakage (FTB) in 26% and 40% of specimens, similar or higher than observed for most species with pseudoautotomy. There is no sexual difference in FTB for D. brazili, and no relationship between tail breakage and snout–vent length (SVL). For D. dicrous, tail breakage is more frequently observed in males when specimens are <710 mm SVL, but for longer specimens, the FTB is higher in females; this strange pattern may not be explained by a single hypothesis. The FTB does not vary significantly between disjunct populations of D. dichrous, suggesting that they are subject to similar predation pressures and escape rates, or minor or no effect of habitat structure on predation risk. The FTB increases with SVL in D. dichrous (but not in D. brazili, probably due to sample size), which is an indication that as the snake grows, the chance of being injured increases and partial tail loss becomes an efficient defense. The multiple tail break hypothesis is not supported for the genus Drymoluber Amaral, 1930, remaining restricted to taxa with specialized pseudoautotomy.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".