Ants: A food source sought by Slovenian brown bears (<i>Ursus arctos</i>)?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the heavily managed boreal forest of Scandinavia, ants, especially large colonies of red forest ants (Formica spp.), are abundant and brown bears (Ursus arctos) intensively feed on them. In contrast, the beech (Fagus sylvatica) forests of Slovenia provide only suboptimal habitat for ants and large ant colonies are virtually absent. To quantify how much ant use by brown bears is a matter of availability or preference, we quantified ant availability, species composition, and ant use. The estimated biomass of ants available to brown bears was very low in Slovenia compared with those in Sweden, averaging 135 vs. 9600 g/ha, respectively. Nevertheless, the frequency of occurrence of ants in Slovenian brown bear scats was high, averaging 85% and accounting for 25% of the ingested dry mass during the summer, which was nearly as much as their frequency of occurrence in Swedish brown bear scats during the summer. Although brown bears in Slovenia had year-round access to artificial feeding sites and the availability of ants is only about 1% of the biomass found in Sweden, they consumed about 50% of the quantity of ants compared with the brown bears in Sweden. Our results show that ants are an important and sought-after food source for brown bears in Slovenia, and the occurrence of ants should be considered in habitat-suitability models.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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".