Genetic Diversity and the Possible Origin of Contemporary Elk (Cervus canadensis) Populations in the Trans-Pecos Region of Texas
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Elk (Cervus canadensis) historically are among the most widely distributed members of the deer family, occupying much of the United States, Canada, and northern Mexico.The natural distribution of this species decreased substantially in the early 20 th century, presumably resulting in the extirpation of populations in Texas.In the past 40 years, several herds of free-ranging elk have re-appeared in the Trans-Pecos region of Texas.For some herds, it is not known if the origin was: 1) the result of individuals that escaped from captive herds; 2) an expansion of previously transplanted individuals from South Dakota and Oregon into Texas; or 3) the result of natural emigrants from southeastern New Mexico into the Trans-Pecos region.The objective of this study was to use DNA sequences from the mitochondrial cytochrome-b gene and D-Loop region, in combination with nine microsatellite loci, to assess genetic divergence, relationships, and origin(s) of the contemporary elk herds in Texas.Findings of the mitochondrial sequence data depicted a high degree of relatedness among individuals throughout the sampling area; whereas, microsatellite data revealed differences in frequencies of alleles in the Glass Mountain populations of Texas compared to samples from South Dakota, New Mexico, and the Davis Mountains.Further, computer simulations of population genetic parameters based on the microsatellite data supported a scenario depicting the origin of contemporary elk in Texas likely was the result of natural emigrants from New Mexico or descendants of previously introduced individuals from New Mexico.In addition, simulations did not detect evidence of a genetic bottleneck during the past 350 generations, indicating a long, shared history between Texas and New Mexico populations.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".