Body condition of translocated African elephants (Loxodonta africana) in a semi-arid environment: Effects of seasonality, age-sex, and management interventions
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
African elephants ( Loxodonta africana ) translocated to the semi-arid Nama-Karoo biome in South Africa present a unique opportunity to study body condition in a resource-scarce environment. We used a longitudinal dataset spanning four years to examine how body condition varies in relation to seasonality, rainfall, and age-sex classes. Contrary to our predictions, rainfall and seasonal changes had limited influence on body condition. Instead, year-round availability of principal forage, including resilient plant species such as Vachellia karroo , likely buffered elephants from seasonal fluctuations in body condition. Adult females exhibited the highest body condition scores, while adult males had the lowest, challenging findings from other populations in more resource-abundant habitats. Juvenile elephants had intermediate scores, contrary to predictions that resource scarcity would predominantly affect younger age groups. These findings suggest that current density and resource availability on this fenced reserve support acceptable body condition levels, comparable to other South African fenced reserves. This study underscores the importance of adaptive management practices in marginal environments and highlights potential implications of life history traits and contraception use for elephant welfare and population dynamics.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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) | 0.000 | 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