Is It a Boy or a Girl? Testing Hypotheses to Explain Variable Sex Ratios in Columbian Ground Squirrels
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Photo 1. Columbian ground squirrel female with dry grass material collected from the meadow she inhabits, with which she will line her burrow. Ground squirrel females give birth and raise their young in individual nest burrows that they defend against other colony members. Daily field observations allow us to detect and identify those nest burrows and capture the young as they first emerge above ground, around the time of weaning. Photo credit: Sebastian Sosa, Institut Pluridisciplinaire Hubert Curien, CNRS, France. Photo 2. Columbian ground squirrel juvenile busy foraging. Offspring are born naked and blind, and nursed in nest burrows over a period of approximately 27–28 days. They are weaned shortly after and must rapidly forage and gain weight over a few weeks before their first hibernation. Our study suggests that male offspring are costlier to produce than females, in terms of body mass. With more local kin present, mothers in the best condition biased offspring sex ratio towards males, and mothers in poor condition biased offspring sex ratio towards females. Without co-breeding close kin, the pattern was reversed, with mothers in the best condition producing more daughters, and mothers in poor condition producing more sons. These results suggest a combination of influences of relative maternal condition and matriline dominance on offspring sex ratio. Photo credit: Sebastian Sosa, Institut Pluridisciplinaire Hubert Curien, CNRS, France. These photographs illustrate the article “Parental investment in the Columbian ground squirrel: empirical tests of sex allocation models” by Thibaut Barra, Vincent A. Viblanc, Claire Saraux, Jan O. Murie, and F. Stephen Dobson, published in Ecology. https://doi.org/10.1002/ecy.3479
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".