The Age of Snakes: a comparison of three Canadian species at their northern peripheries
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Aging animals enables an understanding of life-history strategies, population dynamics, and conservation concerns. Such information is particularly wanting for reptiles at their range peripheries where life-history trade-offs make body size an unreliable surrogate for age. Using skeletochronology we quantified the ages of three species sampled near their northern range limits (Common gartersnake – Thamnophis sirtalis, Western Rattlesnake – Crotalus oreganus, Great Basin Gophersnake – Pituophis catenifer). Considerable range in length was seen for snakes of the same age, and the relationship between age and size was stronger in males. Male gartersnakes reached a size associated with sexual maturity in about half the time of females, but for the other two species there was no significant difference between sexes. The oldest snakes sampled were 10–12 years, with one outlier gartersnake estimated at 15 years. Given that females in northern populations cannot reproduce annually, our estimated ages of these snakes suggest reproductive bouts occur only a small number of times during their lifespan, reflecting the precarious existence of northern snake populations. Age data improves our understanding of how life-history varies with locations (including latitude), and further studies that collect contemporary and widespread data on this basic population parameter are required.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".