Reproductive Failure Predicts Intracolony Dispersal of Female Black-Tailed Prairie Dogs (Cynomys ludovicianus) in a Northern Population
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Dispersal in mammals is typically male-biased and occurs primarily in sexually immature individuals. These dispersal characteristics are especially true for ground-dwelling sciurids, such as black-tailed prairie dogs (Cynomys ludovicianus), that have polygynous breeding systems, with dispersing males and philopatric females. Prairie dogs are small, colonial rodents found in patches throughout the Great Plains of North America. Previous literature reports that females exist in philopatric units called coteries, typically with one unrelated breeding male. Yearling males disperse from their natal coterie in order to form their own coteries. We observed 1450 prairie dogs over 3 consecutive years in one colony near the northern limit of this species' range, in Grasslands National Park, Saskatchewan. We found that female dispersal occurred at higher rates than previously reported in the literature. We found no difference between the rate of intracolony dispersal for males and females in our study population. Also, we observed that the majority (14/21) of the dispersing females had recently experienced reproductive failure. We suggest that these females dispersed to increase their potential fitness by attempting reproduction in a new territory. This finding is the first instance of a ground-dwelling sciurid demonstrating female-biased breeding dispersal and suggests that factors influencing dispersal are more complicated than previously reported for black-tailed prairie dogs.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 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) | 0.000 | 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".