Native and invasive squirrels show different behavioural responses to scent of a shared native predator
Bibliographic record
Abstract
) can reverse the replacement of red squirrels by grey squirrels, but the underlying mechanism of how pine martens suppress grey squirrels is little understood. Research suggests the reversal process is driven by direct predation, but why the native red squirrel may be less susceptible than the invasive grey squirrel to predation by a commonly shared native predator, is unknown. A behavioural difference may exist with the native sciurid being more effective at avoiding predation by the pine marten with which they have a shared evolutionary history. In mammals, olfactory cues are used by prey species to avoid predators. To test whether anti-predator responses differ between the native red squirrel and the invasive grey squirrel, we exposed both species to scent cues of a shared native predator and quantified the responses of the two squirrel species. Red squirrels responded to pine marten scent by avoiding the feeder, increasing their vigilance and decreasing their feeding activity. By contrast, grey squirrels did not show any anti-predator behaviours in response to the scent of pine marten. Thus, differences in behavioural responses to a shared native predator may assist in explaining differing outcomes of species interactions between native and invasive prey species depending on the presence, abundance and exposure to native predators.
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 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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| 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".