Depredation attempt on novel prey by Northern Pinesnake (<i>Pituophis m. melanoleucus</i>)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
T he genus Pituophis, comprised of seven species of large, stout-bodied colubrids that collectively range from southern New Jersey westward into southern Canada and southward through Guatemala, are known predators of rodents and other small mammals at all age classes (e.g., Palmer and Braswell 1995; Werler and Dixon 2000; Ernst and Ernst 2003).However, jumping mice of the genus Zapus have not been recorded as prey of Pituophis.At 1540 h on 14 July 2023, while conducting surveys for Northern Pinesnakes (Pituophis m. melanoleucus) in Ocean County, New Jersey, we encountered a mouse, later identified via Reid (2006) as a Meadow Jumping Mouse (Zapus hudsonius) in the coils of a juvenile Northern Pinesnake (total length ~70-75 cm) (Fig. 1).The snake retained its grip on the mouse until one of us stepped away to retrieve a proper camera for documentation, at which time it relaxed its grip, unwound its coils, and rapidly fled down a "dime-sized" hole 3 cm away.After 15 minutes, the snake twice attempted to leave its retreat, presumedly to consume the dead mouse.Although we were forced to aban-don the observation in light of impending thunderstorms, we speculated that once the snake was confident in our absence, it left the burrow and consumed the mouse.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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) | 0.003 | 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".