Snake harassment in the Cape ground squirrel (Xerus inauris): variation in anti-predator behaviours, predator discrimination and venom resistance in a facultative cooperative breeder.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Predator harassment is an anti-predator behaviour that may increase a harasser’s risk of predation but decrease the potential for predation for other members of a group. The Cape ground squirrel (Xerus inauris) is a facultative cooperative breeder from southern Africa that harasses venomous snakes. The objective of my study was to examine predator harassment to determine: 1) whether predator harassment was part of alloparental care by comparing harassment behaviour among age and sex classes; 2) how individuals adjusted their behaviour against different snake species; 3) whether olfaction was used in discrimination of snakes; and 4) if individuals possessed venom resistance against venomous snakes. I found that females with juvenile offspring harass snakes longer and more intensely than other individuals, suggesting that predator harassment was a maternal behaviour. Squirrels increased harassment, inspection and vigilant behaviours with risk when exposed to both live snakes and snake odours suggesting they can use olfaction to discriminate snake predators. I also found no venom resistance in Cape ground squirrels concluding the cost of envenomation was significant.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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 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".