An inexpensive artificial snake hibernaculum built using readily available plumbing supplies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Artificial snake hibernacula are anthropogenic structures used by snakes in temperate zones to survive harsh winter conditions. Artificial hibernacula can be intentionally created for various purposes including herpetoculture, research, habitat enhancement and conservation, or to offset development impacts. Here we present a design for an artificial snake hibernaculum for research use that was convenient (manually installed) and cost-effective ($91 CAD ea.). The hibernaculum was made of HDPE and ABS plumbing hardware, and measured ∼160 cm long by ∼10 cm wide. Our design was multi-chambered, descended to the groundwater table, and was modelled after the burrowing crayfish burrows used as overwinter refugia by snakes in our study area. Installation was completed using a manual soil auger in areas with soil depths of ∼115 cm. Removable components would allow easy ingress and egress of snakes, and threaded caps would facilitate monitoring via borescope camera. Dataloggers were used in 4 unoccupied hibernacula during one hibernation period, and results demonstrated that hibernacula supported a low mean air temperature and a high mean relative humidity. The hibernacula also provided a substantial buffer against extreme outside temperature and humidity. Further testing may demonstrate the suitability of our hibernaculum design for herpetoculture or conservation purposes.•Installed using a manual soil auger in areas with soil depths of ∼115 cm•Removable components allow for safe and easy ingress/egress of wild-caught or captive-reared snakes•Removable cap and simplified shape facilitate health monitoring of snakes via borescope camera.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.002 |
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".