Patterns of variation in spring emergence by black rat snakes (Elaphe obsoleta obsoleta)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Substantial individual variation in timing of emergence from hibernation has been reported among reptiles, although few studies have addressed the causes of that variation. Here we report patterns of spring emergence by black rat snakes (Elaphe obsoleta obsoleta) observed at 13 communal hibernacula in eastern Ontario from 1992-1997. Because our study area is at the northern extreme of the species' range, we expected synchronous emergence given the very short active season (about 5 months). Despite these apparent time constraints, however, the emergence period lasted an average of 40 days. Although we found significant variation in timing of emergence among years and among hibernacula, we found no evidence of a simple latitudinal gradient in mean emergence dates. Within hibernacula, significantly more snakes emerged on days with high maximum air temperatures, but maximum air temperature explained only a small amount of the variation among years in emergence dates. Larger individuals emerged earlier than smaller individuals, as predicted if early spring predation risk is higher for smaller snakes. Females tended to emerge slightly earlier than males. Condition was not a significant factor determining timing of emergence in our population. Individuals demonstrated significant repeatability between years in their time of emergence relative to other snakes in the same bibernaculum.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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) | 0.025 | 0.001 |
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".