A novel method for affixing Global Positioning System (GPS) tags to urban Norway rats (Rattus norvegicus): feasibility, health impacts and potential for tracking movement
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite the ubiquity of rats, we lack an understanding of how they move within the urban environment. Traditional tools for studying rat movement, such as capture-mark-recapture, are time-intensive and provide coarse movement estimates. Alternative methods, such as continuous tracking by radio-telemetry are difficult to employ in cities where buildings may obstruct radio signals. Global Positioning System (GPS) tags are a promising alternative for resolving fine-scale movement patterns. To test the utility of GPS tracking for urban rats, we affixed tags to 14 sexually mature Norway rats (Rattus norvegicus) in Vancouver, Canada, using veterinary adhesive and absorbable sutures. Six GPS tags had remote-download capabilities and eight stored location data downloadable upon tag recovery. We did not acquire location data from either tag type. While the data receiver successfully recognized five of six remote-download tags, these tags had not stored any locations. Further, of the three recaptured rats (21.4%), all had dislodged tags, although there were no observable adverse health effects from tag attachment. Given low recapture success, our results suggest that remote-download technologies offer greater potential for data recovery. That remote-download tags did not record locations could be due to obstruction of tag line-of-sight with a satellite either through rat ecology (e.g. burrowing), and/or removal in obstructed areas. Future technological advancements, such as surgically implantable tags that hinder removal, may improve the potential use of GPS tags to track urban rat movement. This information is essential to develop effective rat control strategies and mitigate future rat-related public health concerns.
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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 | 0.002 | 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 | 0.000 |
| 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".