Effect of population density on water influx and distribution in the desert snail<i>Trochoidea seetzenii</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Using the snail Trochoidea seetzenii and a field study, we tested whether water influx in a desert organism is density dependent. We introduced 160 snails (mean body mass ± SD = 1.85 ± 0.25 g) into sites with natural high (~50 snails m-2) and low (~10 snails m-2) density populations. The introduced snails were divided into two groups: 1) free, which could disperse into the local population, and 2) enclosed, which were kept under constant and high density (~50 snails m-2). Water influx of the snails was measured when their water source was only dew and also after a rainfall. In addition, we measured the movement of snails on shrubs after dew and among shrubs after rainfall. The following results emerged: i) water influx was highest for free snails that were introduced into low-density populations; ii) water influx of free and enclosed snails in sites with high-density populations were similar; iii) the number of snails that moved on a shrub in relation to the total number and the average vertical distance movement per snail were density dependent; and iv) movement distance among shrubs was higher for snails that were introduced into high-density areas than for snails that were introduced into low-density areas. We concluded that when T. seetzenii used dew on shrubs as a water source, its water influx was density dependent. This relationship may be explained by the small amount and short duration of dew availability and by the searching behaviour of snails for dew. We assume that density-dependent water influx may be found in many species of desert invertebrates and suggest that density-dependent water influx may be a controller of invertebrate behaviour, distribution, and abundance in arid environments.
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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".