Density‐Dependent Foraging and Interference Competition by Common Gartersnakes are Temperature Dependent
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The ideal free distribution (IFD) predicts that optimal foragers will select foraging patches to maximize food rewards and that groups of foragers should thus be distributed between food patches in proportion to the availability of food in those patches. Because many of the underlying mechanisms of foraging are temperature dependent in ectotherms, the distribution of ectothermic foragers between food patches may similarly depend on temperature because the difference in fitness rewards between these patches may change with temperature. We tested the hypothesis that the distribution of Common Gartersnakes ( Thamnophis sirtalis ) between food patches can be explained by an IFD, but that conformance to an IFD weakens as temperature departs from the optimal temperature because fitness rewards, interference competition and the number of individuals foraging are highest at the optimal temperature. First, we determined the optimal temperature for foraging. Second, we examined group foraging at three temperatures and three density treatments. Search time was optimized at 27°C, handling time at 29°C and digestion time at 32°C. Gartersnakes did not match an IFD at any temperature, but their distribution did change with temperature: snakes at 20°C and at 30°C selected both food patches equally, while snakes at 25°C selected the low food patch more at low density and the high food patch more at high density. Food consumption and competition increased with temperature, and handling time decreased with temperature. Temperature therefore had a strong impact on foraging, but did not affect the IFD. Future work should examine temperature‐dependent foraging in ectotherms that are known to match an IFD.
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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) | 0.000 | 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".