Familiarity and social relationships in degus (<i>Octodon degus</i>)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
) are a highly gregarious species of caviomorph rodent native to South America. Kinship does not appear to play a role in degu social structure, and alloparenting is often observed between unrelated females. We hypothesize that female degus readily establish new, cooperative peer relationships. Here we examined changes in dyadic behavior as individuals became more familiar, testing the prediction that interactions between female strangers would quickly resemble those of cagemates. Adult degus underwent a several week series of 20 minute "reunion" social exposures, interleaving reunions with initial strangers and, as a control, familiar cagemates. Males showed initially higher levels of interaction with strangers that converged with cagemate levels over experience. Females could be split into two groups: those that consistently interacted more with strangers (SC-HIGH) and those that did not (SC-LOW); however, unlike males, the higher interaction levels observed between strangers did not change with familiarity. Following 10 reunion sessions female strangers were housed together to create "new cagemates". Even after co-housing, SC-HIGH (but not SC-LOW) females continued to interact more with the relatively unfamiliar peer than their prior cagemate, particularly in face-to-face and rear-sniffing interactions. A final set of reunions with new strangers found that individual differences in female responses to social novelty were preserved. These results reveal sex differences in the rules relating familiarization to social relationships in degus, and that female predispositions toward cooperation may be due to inherent responses to new individuals more than to how they negotiate relationships over time.
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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) | 0.000 | 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) | 0.001 | 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 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".