Mycophagy of White-Tailed Deer (Odocoileus virginianus Zimmermann) in the Boreal Forest
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Mushrooms are a little known source of food for large herbivores, but are of high quality because of their high protein content and digestibility. Approximately 50 epigeous and hypogeous mushroom and lichen species have been identified in the diet of cervids so far using macro remains. Our main objective was to determine which mushroom species are consumed by white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus Zimmermann) using a molecular approach. We collected 114 fecal samples from deer harvested in 2014 and 2015 on Anticosti Island (Québec, Canada), extracted total DNA from feces, and amplified fungal DNA specifically via polymerase chain reaction. Amplified fungi DNA was then sequenced with the Illumina method to identify mushroom species consumed by deer. Our results revealed that deer harvested consumed up to 4979 fungal species, including 580 species that appeared to be consumed directly. Adults tended to consume a higher mushroom diversity than juveniles, and mushroom diversity consumed by deer was much higher in 2015 than 2014. Adult females consumed a higher mushroom diversity than males, especially lactating females. Our results contribute to the understanding of the role of mushrooms and their large diversity in white-tailed deer diet.
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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".