Fungi in the winter diets of northern flying squirrels and red squirrels in the boreal mixedwood forest of northeastern Alberta
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Gut contents of 138 northern flying squirrels (Glaucomys sabrinus) and 75 red squirrels (Tamiasciurus hudsonicus), which had been trapped from November to February in the boreal forest of northeastern Alberta, were examined to determine which fungi were consumed as food during the winter months in this habitat. Spores of epigeous Boletales, Russulaceae, and Cortinariaceae were most frequent and numerous. Hypogeous ascomycetes (unidentified species of Elaphomyces and Tuber) and basidiomycetes (unidentified species of Gautieria, Hymenogaster, Hysterangium, and Rhizopogon) were sometimes present in substantial amounts but were not as frequent as the remains of epigeous fungi. Guts sometimes contained remains of the tough or carbonaceous sporocarps of unidentified species of the Hymenochaetales, Diatrypaceae, Xylariaceae, and Bankeraceae. The spores of some rust fungi (e.g., Phragmidium fusiforme) along with the conidia (e.g., Helicoma sp.) and ascospores of microfungi (e.g., Sordariaceae) were also detected. Lichen tissues were absent, and this contrasts with previous suggestions that lichens are a winter food of sciurids in regions with substantial snowfall. A parallel analysis of 110 faecal pellets from northern flying squirrels collected in the same area from June to August confirms that fungi are important in its summer diet.Key words: Glaucomys sabrinus, Tamiasciurus hudsonicus, fungi, mycophagy, Sciuridae.
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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 | 0.001 | 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".