Overwintering site fidelity and communal hibernation predispose Northern Map Turtles to mass mortality events
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Mass mortality events appear to be increasing in intensity and frequency, so understanding their causes and consequences is imperative for wildlife conservation. We report on a mass mortality event in a population of Northern Map Turtles ( Graptemys geographica (LeSueur, 1817)). At a communal overwintering site, 142 carcasses (ca. 10% of population) were recovered, seemingly depredated by river otters ( Lontra canadensis (Schreber, 1777)). We compared the size and sex of the carcasses to those of turtles that survived. Smaller turtles and males were more likely to be depredated than larger turtles and females. Using captures made at the same overwintering site between 2003 and 2022, we assessed the vulnerability of this population to mass mortality events during winter. Nearly 60% of the 1875 turtles marked between 2003 and 2022 used the overwintering site where the mass mortality event occurred at least once. On average, turtles overwintered at the site at least 38% of the winters between their first and last capture. Our study shows how behaviour and physiology interact to predispose a species to mass mortality events and ecological traps. Protecting overwintering sites and minimizing human pressures affecting winter depredation may be essential for the preservation of certain turtle populations.
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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".