Life history traits, social organisation and the drivers of sociality in an invasive ground squirrel
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sociality evolves when the benefits outweigh the costs of interacting with conspecifics and can be influenced by genetic, phylogenetic, life history, or ecological constraints. Many groups are formed by natal philopatry with the environment constraining levels of sociality. For example, diurnal rodents living in harsh environments can be social to avoid the costs of predation. I used the invasive population of the Barbary ground squirrel (Atlantoxerus getulus) on the arid island of Fuerteventura, Spain, as my study system to explore this idea. Two Barbary ground squirrels were introduced to Fuerteventura in 1965. As they are invasive, I first questioned whether life history traits influenced their invasion success. Then, I used observational, experimental and genetic data to investigate whether they are social and whether predator avoidance is a selective pressure influencing their social patterns by studying their vigilance and alarm vocalisations. Barbary ground squirrels have large and frequent litters, and thus show potential for rapid population growth with a generation time of approximately one year, which may have contributed to their invasion success. They are social, as both males and females interact throughout the day, but they show sexual segregation of sleeping burrows. As group size increased, individual vigilance did not decrease, but collective vigilance did increase and they use alarm calls to warn group members of danger. Hence, they show partial collective detection of predators. The absence of a group-size effect can be explained since the squirrels synchronise their vigilance bouts. Thus, the constraints of living as a diurnal species in an arid environment and predation pressure are possible selective pressures explaining sociality in the invasive Barbary ground squirrel. This thesis advances our understanding of sociality in African ground squirrels, but also provides valuable insight into population growth and corresponding invasion success of an introduced species, as invasive species provide a unique framework to study evolution of sociality and population biology over a relatively short timeframe.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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 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".