Effect of raven Corvus corax scavenging on the kill rates of wolf Canis lupus packs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
During late winter 1991 and 1992, we investigated the influence of raven Corvus corax scavenging on the predation rate by different-sized wolf Canis lupus packs on moose Alces alces in the Yukon Territory, Canada. To assess the magnitude of scavenging, we presented 10 ungulate carcasses, pre-warmed to simulate the flesh temperature of freshly-killed prey, to scavengers and measured their daily consumption. Ravens were by far the main scavengers and on average, we counted 18.5 ± 12.7 (SD) ravens and documented removal of 14.1 ± 1.3 (SE) kg biomass each day (N = 53 observation days). However, assuming a daily scavenging rate of 14 kg by ravens fails to explain the almost equally short handling times for moose carcasses of small, medium and large packs. Only when raven consumption rate varies with pack size can we match the observed pattern. Assuming complete consumption, daily raven scavenging has to be 43 kg for ravens feeding on the kills of small wolf packs, 21 kg for ravens feeding on the kills of medium packs and close to zero for ravens feeding on the kills of large packs. Thus raven-wolf competition is highest for small packs, where ravens manage to remove up to 75% of the edible biomass and very low for large packs where ravens hardly manage to remove any edible biomass. Large packs seem to leave less opportunity for ravens to feed on carcasses, possibly because some wolves are always present at the kill and either actively chase away ravens or inhibit access to the carcass.
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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) | 0.001 | 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 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".