American Pikas' (<i>Ochotona princeps</i>) Foraging Response to Hikers and Sensitivity to Heat in an Alpine Environment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Optimal foraging theory predicts tradeoffs in animals balancing net energy intake and predator avoidance. In particular, overall foraging activity could be low if (1) perception of predation risk is high or (2) abiotic conditions are suboptimal. American pikas (Ochotona princeps) are small, food-hoarding mammals whose foraging opportunities are restricted by heat and risk of predation. If hiking disturbance is perceived by pikas as predation risk, it could reduce the amount of food stored overwinter, possibly affecting survival. We simulated hiker disturbance events for 48 pikas in Mount Revelstoke and Glacier National Parks, British Columbia, to estimate foraging time lost due to hikers. We tested risk avoidance hypotheses using four indicators of risk behavior: alert distance (DA), flight initiation distance (DF), exit delay (TE), and delay in return to forage (TR). All hiker disturbance events elicited antipredator behaviors in foraging pikas and reduced foraging time; however, when compared to increasing temperatures over 4–6 hour observation periods, the latter best predicted a reduction in pikas' foraging activity. For every 1 °C increase in temperature, pika foraging activity decreased by 3%. Pikas near trails (<50 m) lost an average of 4.1 (SE = 0.6) minutes of foraging time per disturbance event compared to 13.2 (SE = 1.7) minutes lost by pikas with territories >100 m away from trails. Such differences might reflect habituation in pikas undergoing frequent disturbance. Monitoring pika populations for declines would be sensible given projected trends in warming climate and potential increases in hiking traffic.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 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) | 0.000 | 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".