Mechanisms and consequences of sexual conflict in garter snakes (Thamnophis sirtalis, Colubridae)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Red-sided garter snakes (<it>Thamnophis sirtalis parietalis</it>) court and mate in early spring around large communal overwintering dens in central Manitoba. Emerging females are immediately covered by dozens or hundreds of vigorously-courting males, potentially imposing significant costs to the female. By manipulating numbers of courting males (both directly and by applying anticourtship pheromones), we quantified the degree to which female dispersal from the den is hindered by courtship. Courted females dispersed only about half as fast as did solitary females. Blood lactate levels were higher in mating than in courting or noncourting snakes of both sexes; the high levels of lactate in mating females support the idea that courtship is physiologically stressful to these animals, perhaps via constraints to female respiration. In arena trials, females that were exercised to exhaustion before courtship mated with smaller males than did control females. The spatial distribution of snakes around the den exhibits substantial heterogeneity, with densities often varying markedly between adjacent areas. Arena trials mimicking this heterogeneity showed that unmated females avoided parts of the enclosure containing scent cues from males. Our data support the hypothesis that courtship in <it>T. s. parietalis</it> confers significant costs to females, and that female behaviors have evolved to reduce those costs.
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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".