Northern Snakes Appear Much More Abundant in Old Fields than in Forests
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Temperature is one of the most important factors regulating habitat selection by ectotherms. Through behavioural thermoregulation, reptiles maintain preferred body temperatures and thereby maximize fitness. At northern latitudes, small colubrids appear to use forest habitat rarely because of thermal constraints. In cool environments, open habitats such as old fields offer more favourable thermal conditions than forest. We studied two northern colubrid snakes, Red-bellied Snake (Storeria occipitomaculata) and Common Gartersnake (Thamnophis sirtalis), in Gatineau Park, Quebec, Canada, to test the hypothesis that small northern snakes are more abundant in open than in closed habitats because open habitats provide better opportunities for thermoregulation. Snakes were sampled using large arrays of tin and plywood coverboards. Snakes were indeed much more abundant in old fields than in forest, and fields offered more favourable thermal conditions. Most snakes were captured in spring and summer (May to August) when temperatures were highest. Storeria occipitomaculata preferred tin over plywood coverboards. We confirmed an apparent strong preference for open habitats in northern snakes.
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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 | 0.000 | 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) | 0.003 | 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".