Post-rut aggression in caribou: limited evidence for interference competition but strong evidence for male harassment
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Social competition for resources is widespread among animals. Females of many species compete for foraging resources through interference competition, which is a behavioural interaction between animals that reduces an individual’s access to shared resources. In addition to competition from other females, females also often face harassment from males during and after the breeding season. The female competition hypothesis predicts that female-initiated aggression associated with foraging competition increases as a function of group size, but we expected this effect to be more pronounced in higher quality foraging habitat. The male harassment hypothesis predicts that male harassment of females should also increase as a function of group size as well as a function of the ratio of males to other group members. Here, we tested the female competition and male harassment hypotheses for caribou ( Rangifer tarandus ) within the context of variation in the social environment (i.e., group size and sex ratio) and the physical environment (i.e., variation in habitat quality). We conducted focal observations of caribou on Fogo Island, Newfoundland, over three years and quantified aggressive social interactions in different habitat types to test our hypotheses. Specifically, we took advantage of natural variation in caribou behaviour in our system and observed caribou foraging in an enhanced habitat (i.e., recreational sports complex field) and natural habitat (i.e., lichen barrens). We found limited support for the female competition hypothesis, possibly because of females’ propensity to increase foraging rates in enhanced habitats. By contrast, we found strong support for the male harassment hypothesis, where males increase the frequency of harassment as group size increased. Our results suggest costs of grouping for female caribou in the post-rut time period may be related to the presence of males potentially seeking mating opportunities.
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.
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 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 it