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Record W2784706762 · doi:10.7717/peerj.4293

Are pumas subordinate carnivores, and does it matter?

2018· article· en· W2784706762 on OpenAlex
L. Mark Elbroch, Anna Kusler

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenuePeerJ · 2018
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEnvironmental Science
TopicWildlife Ecology and Conservation
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsSympatric speciationInterspecific competitionApex predatorBiologyPredationEcologyDominance (genetics)JaguarCompetition (biology)Range (aeronautics)

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Background Interspecific competition affects species fitness, community assemblages and structure, and the geographic distributions of species. Established dominance hierarchies among species mitigate the need for fighting and contribute to the realized niche for subordinate species. This is especially important for apex predators, many of which simultaneous contend with the costs of competition with more dominant species and the costs associated with human hunting and lethal management. Methods Pumas are a widespread solitary felid heavily regulated through hunting to reduce conflicts with livestock and people. Across their range, pumas overlap with six apex predators (gray wolf, grizzly bear, American black bear, jaguar, coyote, maned wolf), two of which (gray wolf, grizzly bear) are currently expanding in North America following recovery efforts. We conducted a literature search to assess whether pumas were subordinate or dominant with sympatric apex predators, as well as with three felid mesocarnivores with similar ecology (ocelot, bobcat, Canada lynx). We also conducted an analysis of the spatial distributions of pumas and their dominant sympatric competitors to estimate in what part of their range, pumas are dominant versus subordinate. Results We used 64 sources to assess dominance among pumas and other apex predators, and 13 sources to assess their relationships with felid mesocarnivores. Evidence suggested that wolves, grizzly bears, black bears, and jaguars are dominant over pumas, but that pumas are dominant over coyotes and maned wolves. Evidence suggested that pumas are also dominant over all three felid mesocarnivores with which they share range. More broadly, pumas are subordinate to at least one other apex carnivore in 10,799,252 (47.5%) of their 22,735,268 km 2 range across North and South America. Discussion Subordinate pumas change their habitat use, suffer displacement at food sources, likely experience increased energetic demands from harassment, exhibit increased starvation, and are sometimes directly killed in competitive interactions with dominant competitors. Nevertheless, we lack research clearly linking the costs of competition to puma fitness. Further, we lack research that assesses the influence of human effects simultaneous with the negative effects of competition with other sympatric carnivores. Until the time that we understand whether competitive effects are additive with human management, or even potentially synergistic, we encourage caution among managers responsible for determining harvest limits for pumas and other subordinate, apex carnivores in areas where they are sympatric with dominant species. This may be especially important information for managers working in regions where wolves and brown bears are recolonizing and recovering, and historic competition scenarios among multiple apex predators are being realized.

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.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.009
Threshold uncertainty score0.999

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0050.002

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.

Opus teacher head0.008
GPT teacher head0.218
Teacher spread0.210 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it