Predation patterns on the tundra—genetic barcoding of scats from two sympatric fox species
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the Arctic tundra, climate-induced emergence of the red fox ( Vulpes vulpes (Linnaeus, 1758)), a competitor to the Arctic fox ( Vulpes lagopus (Linnaeus, 1758)), is predicted to influence predation patterns of both fox mesopredators. In this study, we (i) identified predator species from scats through an established barcoding approach and (ii) explored the use of a cheap, quick barcoding method of fox feces ( n = 103). We investigated differences in diet between the red fox (predicted generalist predator) and Arctic fox (predicted specialist predator) over 2 years with varying prey abundance. We amplified short DNA fragments (<200 bp) from small rodents, birds and hares. For both predators, there was a high frequency of occurrence of rodents (38%–69%) identifying them as primary prey species and birds as secondary prey species (13%–31%). This demonstrates the strength of a straightforward DNA barcoding method for dietary analyses in sympatric fox predators, with species-level resolution of prey. Barcoding is a promising tool for future dietary studies; however, a few methodological improvements, along with extended sampling, are needed for a more complete assessment of fox predation patterns. Integrating high-resolution dietary analyses have great potential to enhance our understanding of predation patterns in Arctic tundra communities.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".