The Diet of Foxes and the Availability of Anthropogenic Food on Prince Edward Island, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It has been postulated that red foxes (Vulpesvulpes) inhabiting Prince Edward Island National Park (Canada) make very little use of natural food sources and that anthropogenic food play an integral part in their diet. The use of anthropogenic food sources has also been associated with an increased number of fatal fox vehicle-collisions in the park. The main goal of this study was to examine the composition of the diet of foxes inhabiting Prince Edward Island National Park and to compare this diet with foxes found in other areas of the island. In particular, we examined the importance of anthropogenic food items in foxes inhabiting the national park. We analyzed 38 stomachs from foxes killed by trappers or vehiclesduring late fall and early winter within and outside the national park. Our results showed that rodents and vegetation were the most common food items present in fox stomachs whether the animals were obtained from within or outside the park. Values of coefficient of variation of food items found in fox stomachs indicated a great diversity in diet composition. However, only six stomachs contained anthropogenic food items. Stomachs of foxes killed by vehicles contained twice the amount of anthropogenic food items than those that were collected from trappers. Overall, our findings indicate that anthropogenic food items are only a minor component in the diet of foxes occurring within the park, at least during the period of time examined in this study. Future studies should examine diet composition during other seasons when the quantity and quality of anthropogenic food sources is different.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.002 |
| 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".