Bibliographic record
Abstract
Even on a good day the environment can be wildly unpredictable, from unexpected gusts of wind to food scarcity, and as humans continue to edge out the natural world, the stress on wild populations is increasing. ‘Bats are critical for the maintenance and stability of many terrestrial ecosystems’, say Mattina Alonge [University of California, Berkeley (UCB), USA] and Lucas Greville (McMaster University, Canada), explaining that these keystone creatures make up over 20% of all mammal species. And the animals are known to be particularly sensitive when under strain. But little was known about the impact that stress might have on their ability to reproduce. Concerned about the effect of stress on already vulnerable bat populations, Alonge and her colleagues decided to find out how a brief period of stress affected the brains and fertility of male big brown bats (Eptesicus fuscus).Sure enough, after an hour of lying on their backs, the quantity of the hormone corticosterone – which controls the body's response to stressful situations – circulating in the young males’ blood had rocketed more than 8-fold while their testosterone levels plummeted by ∼50%. And when the team checked the tubules that produce sperm in the testes, they found those in the stressed bats had shrunk by ∼25%, reducing their ability to produce sperm, and the testes were 5 times more sensitive to the stress hormones in the animals’ blood. Next, Alonge and colleagues turned their attention to the bats’ brains and found that the stressed animals may be releasing more of a key hormone – RFamide-related peptide – which can reduce an animal's fertility and ability to reproduce. Finally, the team checked the general health of the stressed bats and were surprised that genes involved in triggering cell death were active in the testes, suggesting that the animals’ reproductive organs were not in great shape after just one hour of stressful conditions.‘The short time frame of the gonadal response in E. fuscus is unprecedented in mammals, suggesting that bats are highly sensitive to acute stressors’, says Alonge, adding that conservationists need to be aware that male bats are particularly sensitive to stress in the run up to the breeding season, which could impact their ability to produce the next generation.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".