Validation of a radioimmunoassay-based fecal corticosteroid assay for Richardson’s ground squirrels Urocitellus richard-sonii and behavioural correlates of stress
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract We validated a radioimmunoassay-based method quantifying fecal glucocorticoid metabolites (FGMs) from captive male and female Richardson’s ground squirrels Urocitellus richardsonii. Blood samples were drawn to explore the correlation between plasma cortisol and FGM concentrations. We also injected groups of squirrels with normal saline (CTL; control), adre-nocorticotropic hormone (ACTH; stimulating adrenal activity), or dexamethasone (DEX; suppressing adrenal activity). Potential correlations between stress and behaviour were explored through quantification of fecal pellet production and the intervention necessary to elicit defecation, as well as the behaviour of subjects in the context of handling. Changes in plasma cortisol concentration between capture (baseline), and following handling (stress-induced) were also quantified for free-living squirrels. While glucocorticoid concentrations recovered from feces during our captive-animal study were not well correlated with plasma cortisol concentrations, and uncorrelated with defecation or behaviour, FGM concentrations did reflect the activation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. FGM concentrations increased significantly during initial captivity, but declined to baseline level as individuals acclimated to the novel environment. Injection of subjects with ACTH increased FGMs above baseline, confirming activation of the HPA axis. Plasma cortisol concentrations increased significantly with induced stress, indicating that capture and handling activated the glucocorticoid stress response even among previously handled, free-living subjects. Our findings validate a non-invasive tool that will afford new insight into the physiological processes underlying social, reproductive and antipredator behaviour of Richardson’s ground squirrels.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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) | 0.001 | 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 it