Body condition in Snowy Owls wintering on the prairies is greater in females and older individuals and may contribute to sex-biased mortality
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Birds that winter in cold northern climates experience harsh conditions, including reduced food availability and increased energy demands. In raptors, the ability to forage and maintain body condition may be related to age (hunting experience) or the ability to defend good-quality territories (dominance). We examined the effects of age and sex on body condition and various sources of mortality in wintering Snowy Owls (Bubo scandiacus) on the Canadian prairies. Because of reversed sexual size dimorphism, we predicted that females, the dominant sex, would be in better condition than males and that adults would be in better condition than juveniles. Consistent with these predictions, data from 537 live Snowy Owls trapped over 18 winter field seasons showed that adults were heavier than juveniles for a given body size and carried more fat reserves. We found that 56% of males lacked furcular and wing-pit fat, whereas only 31% of females lacked such fat; and females, but not males, tended to put on fat during the winter months. A comparison of the sex ratio of starving Snowy Owls turned in to rehabilitation centers (63% male) and that of living Snowy Owls observed in the wild (45% male) showed a male bias in starving and diseased individuals. Although most of the wild-trapped birds were above the starvation threshold, the proximate mechanisms by which sex-biased competitive dominance is manifested in differences in body condition and survival warrant further study.
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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) | 0.001 | 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".