Fat and happy in the city: Eastern chipmunks in urban environments
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cities are rapidly expanding, and wildlife may experience different selection pressures in urban environments when compared to natural habitats. Phenotypic differences between urban and natural populations may occur because of the altered urban environment. Behavior, the activity of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis and body condition can be expected to differ between urban and natural habitats. We used the eastern chipmunk (Tamias striatus) to test for differences in behavior assayed from an open field test, hair and fecal cortisol concentrations, and body condition (size-corrected body mass), predicting that urban chipmunks would exhibit more exploratory behavior, higher cortisol concentrations, and higher body condition, than their counterparts from natural habitats. We sampled eastern chipmunks in 2 urban areas paired with natural habitats and subjected adult chipmunks to an open field test, collected hair and fecal samples for the determination of cortisol concentrations, and measured body size and body mass to estimate body condition. Eastern chipmunks in urban habitats had significantly different behavior, tending toward reduced locomotion and grooming, and greater latency, than their counterparts from natural habitats. Urban chipmunks also had lower fecal cortisol concentrations than those from natural habitats, and female chipmunks were in better body condition when captured in urban habitats. These results suggest that urban habitats may be relatively benign for urban chipmunks, perhaps because of reduced need for exploration and the availability of anthropogenic food subsidies associated with urban environments.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".