Thirteen-lined ground squirrel (<em>Ictidomys tridecemlineatus</em>) morphology and burrow placement across a latitudinal range
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Thirteen-lined ground squirrels (TLGS; Ictidomys tridecemlineatus) are burrowing obligate hibernators whose species range extends over 20 degrees latitude in North America from Texas to Canada. Despite their ubiquity as laboratory animals for hibernation research, relatively little is known about their life history across their range in the wild. We live-trapped TLGS in parks or cemeteries from Texas to Minnesota, took morphological measurements, and conducted a survey of burrowing locations in 5 states across the latitudinal gradient. We found that soil texture and percent soil organic matter differed at field sites in different states, with Minnesota soil high in sand but low in clay and organic matter, and Texas soil highest in clay and organic matter. Soils at all trap sites were primarily sand or sand/silt, which is easy for animals to burrow through. We also found that burrows tended to be located within 2 m of some sort of visual barrier (usually headstones in cemeteries), but that the availability of preferred food items within 2 m was not predictive of burrow location. Finally, we found that TLGS in Minnesota were longer bodied than southern TLGS, but that the body mass index of Texas animals was higher than that in more northern populations, suggesting that Texas animals fatten for hibernation earlier. Together, these data suggest that, although TLGS experience different environmental conditions across their species range, they either select appropriate microhabitats across that range to meet their physiological requirements or have sufficient phenotypic plasticity to deal with highly variable environmental conditions.Las ardillas de trece líneas (TLGS; Ictidomys tridecemlineatus) son hibernadores obligados excavadores cuyo rango de especies se extiende más de 20 grados de latitud en América del Norte desde Texas hasta Canadá. A pesar del uso común como animales de laboratorio para la investigación de la hibernación, se sabe relativamente poco sobre su historia de vida en su área de distribución en la naturaleza. Nosotras capturamos TLGS en parques o cementerios desde Texas hasta Minnesota, tomamos medidas morfológicas y realizamos un estudio de ubicaciones de excavación en 5 estados a lo largo del gradiente latitudinal. Encontramos diferencias en la textura y el porcentaje de materia orgánica en el suelo en los sitios de campo en diferentes estados, con el porcentaje más bajo de arcilla y materia orgánica y el porcentaje más alto de arena en Minnesota, y el porcentaje más alto de arcilla y materia orgánica en Texas, pero los sitios de trampa en todos los estados tenían suelos compuestos principalmente de arena o arena / limo que son fáciles de por los animals excavar. También las madrigueras estaban a menudo cerca de barreras visuales como lápidas en cementerios, pero la ubicación de las madrigueras no se predijo por la presencia de alimentos preferidos. Finalmente, encontramos que los TLGS en Minnesota tenían un cuerpo más largo que los TLGS en las porciones más al sur del rango, pero que el índice de masa corporal de los animales de Texas era más alto que el de las poblaciones más al norte, lo que sugiere que los animales de Texas engordan para la hibernación más rápidamente. Juntos, estos datos sugieren que, aunque los TLGS experimentan diferentes condiciones ambientales en su rango de especies, seleccionan microhábitats apropiados para sus requisitos fisiológicos o tienen suficiente de plasticidad fenotípica para expandirse a una amplia variedad de hábitats.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".