Smooth Green Snake Use of Dried Cow "Patties" (Feces) as Cover in Prairie in Southern Manitoba
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Finding a Smooth Green Snake (Opheodrys vernalis) in the wild has been a "bucket list" quest for me since moving to Manitoba about 40 years ago.Although active by day in prairie grasslands and associated treed savannahs, their unmarked grass-green colour makes them hard to find (Figure 1). 1,2It is a small snake with a white, pale green or creamy belly, typically 30 to 50 cm long but some can grow to 80 cm. 3,4It eats a variety of small terrestrial invertebrates including caterpillars, crickets, grasshoppers, and spiders. 2 The Smooth Green Snake is "Secure" globally, but its status in the states and provinces in North America ranges from "Presumed Extirpated" to "Secure".In Manitoba it is ranked as "Vulnerable" and therefore of conservation concern. 2 People sometimes find them under pieces of wood, tin or humanmade materials such as plywood (aka coverboards) placed to monitor or research this and other species like the Northern Prairie Skink (Plestiodon septentrionalis) (A.Krause-Danielsen pers.comm.16 December 2024). 1 In one Manitoba Smooth Green Snake study, 92 per cent of 232 captures were of snakes under cover, and 88 per cent of those were under plywood or particle boards. 1 These reptiles use natural cover or coverboards to hide from predators, look for prey, lay eggs, reduce moisture loss and/or regulate their temperature. 5t was with high hopes that my wife Patsy and I accompanied Brooks Duncan and Marcus Skakum to southwestern Manitoba on 20 July 2023 while they conducted biological inventories for skinks and other species at risk (Figure 2).The areas to be inventoried reportedly had plywood coverboards used in the past to monitor skink populations.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".