Red Squirrels Cause Balancing Selection on the Length of White Spruce Cones
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Seed predators act as agents of selection on many conifer species through non-random foraging, but their effects on conifers that use mast seeding as a defense strategy are unknown. Optimal foraging models predict that when resources are scarce predators should act to maximize total energy, while when resources are abundant they should maximize efficiency. Here, I examined North American red squirrel (Tamiasciurus hudsonicus) seed predation on white spruce (Picea glauca). The length of white spruce cones exhibited a trade-off between total energy content and the rate of energy extraction. During mast years there was a low opportunity for selection and no evidence of selection on cone length. In non-mast years, squirrels disproportionately harvested longer cones farther from caches, but shorter cones closer to caches. Red squirrels harvested cones in a manner consistent with central-place foraging theory. However, these opposing relationships on cone length led to weak net selection.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".