Review of evidence that foxes and cats cause extinctions of Australia's endemic mammals
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
Over half of Australia's threatened and extinct endemic mammal species have been attributed to introduced red foxes (Vulpes vulpes) and cats (Felis silvestris catus). But this claim has so far been based on expert opinion. We conducted a timeline analysis, systematic review, and meta-analysis to assess whether the attribution of decline and extinction to these predators is based on evidence. Records for 43.6% and 19.6% of populations did not confirm that extinctions occurred after fox and cat arrival, respectively. Most threatened species have been attributed to these predators without supportive population studies with data (76.1% of species attributed to foxes, and 79.7% to cats). The meta-analysis showed a negative correlation between threatened mammal and fox abundance for spatial but not for temporal correlations, and we found no evidence for a correlation with cats. We conclude that the hypothesis that foxes and cats cause extinctions has come to be accepted with little evidence.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| 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 it