Identification and field testing of sex-attractant semiochemicals produced by male deer mice, <i>Peromyscus maniculatus</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Following previous reports that male deer mice, Peromyscus maniculatus , produce chemical signals that attract conspecific females, we analysed and field-tested sex-attractant semiochemicals (message-bearing chemicals) of male deer mice. Field traps baited with urine- and faeces-soiled bedding of male mice captured adult female, but not male, mice, indicating dissemination of sex-attractant semiochemicals from the males’ excreta. Analysing excreta headspace volatiles of both males and females by gas chromatography–mass spectrometry revealed that 5-methyl-2-hexanone was male-specific, and that eight other ketones (3-methyl-2-pentanone, 2-hexanone, 4-heptanone, 2-heptanone, 6-methyl-2-heptanone, 3-octanone, 2-octanone, 2-nonanone) were 2.6–5.6 times more abundant in male, than in female, samples. In a field experiment with paired trap boxes, treatment boxes baited with the synthetic ketone lure captured 3.4 times more females (17 : 5) and 1.6 times fewer males (5 : 8) than corresponding unbaited boxes. In a follow-up paired-trap field experiment, treatment boxes baited with both the ketone lure and synthetic testosterone captured 8 times more mature females and 2.3 times more immature females, but 9 times fewer immature males, than control boxes baited only with the ketone lure, all indicating that testosterone is a synergistic sex-attractant semiochemical. As previously shown in house mice, Mus musculus , and brown rats, Rattus norvegicus , sex-attractant semiochemicals of male deer mice comprise both volatile and sex steroid components.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".