Summer Movements and Impact of Individual Striped Skunks, <em>Mephitis mephitis</em>, on Duck Nests in Saskatchewan
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Striped Skunks (Mephitis mephitis) are important predators of duck eggs in the Canadian prairies. We estimated the impact of individual Striped Skunks on duck nests by intensive observations of foraging movements and depredation of duck nests in southern Saskatchewan, 1993-1994. Nightly, skunk movements were variable (range 0-20 km per night), and did not differ among seasons for females, or between males and females during the parturition/rearing season. Overall, nightly movement of Striped Skunks averaged 7.4 km for females (SD = 5.9 km, n = 20 females) and 6.7 km for males (SD = 3.2 km, n = 5 males). During 1,873 h of radio-tracking, we observed depredation of 10 duck nests by 8 skunks (7 F, 1 M). Using our observed estimate of one depredation for every 187 h, and averaged nightly activity of 8-10 h per night, we estimated that individual skunks find one duck nest every 19-23 nights. Thus, during the 60-day nesting season for ducks (mid-May to mid-July), individual skunks probably find 2-3 duck nests. These observations reinforce the growing evidence that, at normal duck nest densities (<2.5 nests/ha), depredation of eggs by Striped Skunks is opportunistic, and the impact of Striped Skunks on duck nests is a direct function of Striped Skunk abundance.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".