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Record W2889233427 · doi:10.22621/cfn.v132i1.2045

Factors affecting litter size in Western Gartersnake (<i>Thamnophis elegans</i>) in British Columbia: place, time, and size of mother

2018· article· en· W2889233427 on OpenAlexafffundvenueabout
Patrick T. Gregory, Daniel R. Farr

Bibliographic record

VenueThe Canadian Field-Naturalist · 2018
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEnvironmental Science
TopicWildlife Ecology and Conservation
Canadian institutionsAlberta Environment and Protected AreasUniversity of Victoria
FundersUniversity of Victoria
KeywordsLitterBiologyOffspringEcologyVariation (astronomy)ReproductionMaternal effectDemographyZoology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Life-history traits of organisms are influenced by both genetic and environmental factors. We used counts of offspring in captive-born litters to determine how geographic location, year-to-year variation, and body size of mother affected litter size of Western Gartersnake (Thamnophis elegans) in four widely separated populations in British Columbia. Litter size varied significantly among populations, but that variation was largely explained by differences in maternal body size among populations; that is, larger females had larger litters. With maternal size treated as a covariate, there was no further significant effect of location or of different years within sites on litter size. The overall regression, pooled over sites and years, between litter size and size of mother accounted for 55% of the total variation in litter size. Nonetheless, the significant variation in body size among locations calls for explanation and the consequent differences in litter size could be important demographically. Presumably, the large amount of unexplained residual variation reflects other differences, beyond body size, between individual mothers. Such differences among individuals might be determined by genetics or by environmental effects such as foraging success, but our data cannot address this question.

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 machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.293
Threshold uncertainty score0.588

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0010.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.007
GPT teacher head0.191
Teacher spread0.185 · 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

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2018
Admission routes4
Has abstractyes

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