Seasonal nest use of sympatric North American flying squirrels
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Context Nest or roost sites are important for social thermoregulators – not only because the locations provide shelter from harsh climates, but also because they provide sites for social aggregations. Nest use can therefore be informative about selection pressures facing social thermoregulators. Aims The aim of this study was to assess seasonal changes in nest use of sympatric northern (Glaucomys sabrinus) and southern (Glaucomys volans) flying squirrels. Local sympatry at our study site allowed us to evaluate nest use by individuals of both species subject to similar nest availability. We hypothesised that southern flying squirrels should be more selective than northern flying squirrels, especially in winter due to lower cold tolerance by the southern species. Methods We used radio telemetry to track 57 squirrels during 2019–2022 at a site in central Ontario, Canada. Each squirrel was tracked during the day to their nest site, and tree characteristics – including diameter at breast height, tree species, nest type and decay class – were recorded. Key results Northern flying squirrels used both coniferous and deciduous trees, as well as a mix of cavities, dreys and subterranean nests. Southern flying squirrels nested most often in deciduous tree cavities and used dreys less frequently than northern flying squirrels. The only significant effects in regression models, however, were effects of tree diameter. Both species used large-diameter trees in the winter and summer, and these effects were larger in the winter months. In both seasons, southern flying squirrels used larger trees than northern flying squirrels. Conclusions Our study results were consistent with the hypothesis that nest selection is associated with temperature and squirrel aggregation size. Both northern and southern flying squirrels used large trees during summer and winter months, as would be an expected requirement for aggregation; however, this effect was amplified in southern flying squirrels and in the winter. Implications Cold ambient temperature is an underlying factor in winter months, creating the need for social thermoregulation and increased squirrel aggregation sizes, especially in the small-bodied southern flying squirrel. This in turn leads to a need for large-diameter cavity trees for nest groups to occupy during winter.
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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 | 0.000 | 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) | 0.001 | 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 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".