Nesting in close quarters: causes and benefits of high density nesting in painted turtles
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Nesting is a costly time for female turtles, both energetically and from threat of predation. \nFemales must ensure maximum survival of offspring for population stability and individual \nfitness. I observed signs of communal nesting in female Painted Turtles (Chrysemys picta). \nMy goals were to determine; are females choosing to nest at high nest-densities, what cues do \nthey use to select nest sites, are offspring benefitted. Using ArcGIS, I found that females \nnested in clusters, the location of clusters varied among years, and that nest site selection was \nnot strongly determined by environmental characteristics. When female turtle models were \nplaced on the nesting embankment females nested most often with the highest density of \nmodels. In ~25% of cases, nests were so clustered that eggs were deposited directly into \nexisting nests or directly beside existing nests. Survival of clustered nests (49%) was higher \nthan that of solitary nests (39%). In incubators, older clutches had faster incubation times, \nsuggesting embryonic communication as a mechanism promoting hatching synchrony. We \nstrongly suggest that female Painted Turtles choose to nest in close proximity to conspecifics, \nand that this clustering results in a fitness benefit.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".