Population dynamics and age-dependent mortality processes in tropical reptiles
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Understanding age-dependent mortality processes is a critical challenge for population biologists. Actuarial senescence appears to be a common process across the tree of life. Senescence patterns are highly variable in pluricellular organisms: senescence can be gradual or sharp and its onset may be early or delayed. By contrast, studies revealed that organisms may also not experience senescence at all while others display a “negative senescence”; i.e. a decrease of mortality rate with age. To date, studies on senescence have largely focused on human and other endotherm vertebrates, limiting our understanding of senescence in amniotes as a whole. By contrast, few have examined the diversity of senescence patterns in ectotherm vertebrates as reptiles. Here, we examined population dynamics and age-dependent mortality patterns in three tropical tortoises ( Kinixys erosa, Kinixys homeana, Kinixys nogueyi ) and snakes ( Bitis gabonica, Bitis nasicornis, Causus maculatus ). Our study revealed that tortoises of Kinixys genus had a higher survival and a lower recruitment than snakes of the genera Bitis and Causus , indicating that they have a slower life history. Furthermore, we showed that survival more slowly decreased with age in tortoises than in snakes. In addition, we highlighted contrasted patterns of age-dependent mortality in the three genera. In Kinixys , the relationship between mortality rate and age was positive and linear, suggesting gradual senescence over tortoise lifetime. By contrast, the relationship between mortality rate and age was negative and sharp in Bitis and Causus , possibly due to a “negative senescence” starting early in life. Our study highlighted various age-dependent mortality patterns in tropical reptiles. It also contributed to extend our knowledge of senescence in ectotherm vertebrates whose the demography is still poorly understood. In addition, while negative senescence has never been reported in endotherm vertebrates, our results showed that it can be common phenomenon in ectotherms.
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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) | 0.000 | 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 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".