The socio‐spatial ecology of giant anteaters in the Brazilian Cerrado
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Movement is a key component of an animal's life history. While there are numerous factors that influence movement, there is an inherent link between a species' social ecology and its movement ecology. Despite this inherent relationship, the socio‐spatial ecology of many species remains unknown, hampering ecological theory and conservation alike. Here, we use fine‐scale GPS location data and continuous‐time stochastic processes to study the socio‐spatial ecology of 23 giant anteaters ( Myrmecophaga tridactyla ) in the Brazilian Cerrado. We found that individuals occupied stable home ranges with a mean area of 5.45 km 2 with males having significantly larger home ranges than females. The average amount of home‐range overlap was low (0.20, n = 121 dyads), with no evidence that giant anteater home ranges were structured based on territorial, mate‐guarding, or other social behaviour. We also identified a total of 2774 encounter events. Interestingly, both female–male and male–male dyads had significantly more encounters than female–female dyads, with two pronounced seasonal peaks in female–male encounters. Though encounters occurred frequently, associations between dyads were generally weak and there was little evidence of any correlated movement (mean amount of total correlation = 0.01). Collectively, these findings suggest giant anteaters are a solitary and largely asocial species that readily share space with conspecifics. Despite their present capacity to share space, the combined pressures of being condensed into smaller areas and decreased food availability due to increased pesticide use may cause behavioural changes radiating throughout the population. Our study provides insight into heretofore unknown aspects of the socio‐spatial ecology of this iconic, but understudied species, as well as crucial information for proactive area‐based management. Ultimately, these findings contribute towards sustainable development while potentially maintaining the ecological integrity of giant anteaters and their habitats.
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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 | 0.001 | 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".