First Evidence of Metabolic Heating in a Freshwater Turtle (Chelydra serpentina)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Metabolic heating caused by physiological processes during the development of oviparous embryos can raise nest temperatures above those of the surrounding substrate and may be sufficient to increase embryonic growth rates, influence sex ratios of hatchlings with temperature-dependent sex determination, and increase hatching success in seasonal environments. In sea turtles with large clutch sizes, metabolic heating can raise nest temperatures by as much as 6°C. However, no studies have directly investigated metabolic heating in any species of freshwater turtle. We investigated whether metabolic heating occurs in nests of snapping turtles (Chelydra serpentina) from southeastern Michigan, United States. A temperature logger was placed in the center of 8 unaltered snapping turtle nests. A second temperature logger was placed at the same depth in the surrounding substrate 5 cm from the side of the nest chamber. Metabolic heating is more pronounced in nests with larger clutches, so we artificially increased the size of 2 additional nests using donor clutches of 11 and 21 eggs, respectively. Temperatures were recorded at 2-hr intervals until after the presumptive hatch date of all nests. We found that there was a significant increase both in mean nest temperature and accumulated heat units for natural and experimental treatment nests during the last third of incubation. Further, in nests with experimentally increased clutch sizes, mean nest temperature was significantly greater than substrate temperature throughout incubation, suggesting that large nests also exhibit a thermal inertia that results in positive heat balance throughout development, at least in the soils studied.
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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) | 0.001 | 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 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".