Incidentally gathered natural history information on Bullsnakes (<i>Pituophis catenifer sayi</i>) in southeastern Alberta
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We present observations on Bullsnakes (Pituophis catenifer sayi) gathered during a study of Prairie Rattlesnakes (Crotalus viridis) in a multiple-use, mixed grass landscape adjacent to the South Saskatchewan River, ~30 km northeast of Medicine Hat, Alberta, in May–October 1997. Hibernacula shared with rattlesnakes were located close to the river. We captured 31 Bullsnakes, either in a drift fence array around a hibernaculum or by hand; three were recaptured once. Emergence from the hibernaculum ended in mid-May, and return to it began in early September. A gap in capture events occurred between early July and late August, possibly attributable to fossorial activity during the height of the summer. The sex ratio of captured adult snakes was 0.64 in favour of males. Males attained the greatest maximum body sizes, but there was no significant size dimorphism by sex. Bullsnakes were assignable to juvenile, subadult, and adult classes by body size. Most captures were made on slopes in the immediate vicinity of the river, in areas classed as “thin breaks”, but four captures, about 7 km east of the river, provide evidence of long-distance movements from hibernacula. Captures were seldom made in the vicinity of anthropogenic features. Gas field development has increased greatly in the years since these data were collected. Our findings provide a baseline for Bullsnake population responses to such changes.
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 imitationNot 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.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".