The geographical distribution of rodent granivory and cheek pouches across North America
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Aim One of the specializations that many granivorous rodents exhibit to increase their efficiency in harvesting seeds is cheek pouches. We propose that the presence or absence of cheek pouches is related to seed size and the productivity of the habitat where those rodents reside. Location North America – United States and Canada. Taxon Granivorous rodents. Methods We divided granivorous rodents into those species with and without cheek pouches. We then compiled a list of plant species (n = 389) that are known or suspected to be dispersed by these rodents by scatter hoarding the seeds in soil and compared the richness distributions of small (≤10 mm) and large seeds (>10 mm) to the distributions of rodents with and without cheek pouches. Results Most rodents with cheek pouches live in the arid southwestern North America, whereas most rodents that lack cheek pouches live in the mesic southeastern North America. The richness distribution of rodents with cheek pouches was more similar to the richness distribution of small seeds, and the richness distribution of rodents that lack cheek pouches was more similar to the richness distribution of large seeds (nuts). Rodents with cheek pouches (mean = 59.5 g) are smaller than rodents that lack cheek pouches (592.6 g). Main conclusions Large rodents that lack cheek pouches live mostly in the more productive southeastern North America where there are many trees that produce large nuts. Small rodent with cheek pouches live mostly in the less productive southwestern North America where there are many shrubs, forbs, and grasses that produce small seeds.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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".