The effect of drought on the social structure and use of space in Cape ground squirrels,<i>Xerus inauris</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Through changes in resource abundance, both spatial and temporal variability in environmental conditions can influence the type of sociality and life-history exhibited in a species. We documented the behavior and use of space of Cape ground squirrels, Xerus inauris, both before and during a prolonged (2-year) drought. This southern African species occurs in semiarid regions where drought is unpredictable, but not uncommon. As expected, during the drought we observed larger home ranges, lower population density and reduced breeding. However, body mass and sex ratios did not differ between conditions, and despite an obvious reduction in resources, female social groups did not disband or decrease in size. Instead, both before and during the drought, Cape ground squirrels remained in tightly cohesive social groups. We conclude that the resilient social organization in the face of dramatic changes in resource abundance reflects the great benefit of grouping as an anti-predator strategy for this species.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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".