Change in wing morphology of the European starling during and after colonization of <scp>N</scp>orth <scp>A</scp>merica
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract When exposed to a new area and the potential for range expansion, species may quickly evolve morphological traits that allow them to colonize novel habitat. How quickly these changes occur and how long they subsequently persist in the established population has rarely been documented in birds. The European starling has been introduced in a number of areas around the world, including N orth A merica where an initially small population was established in 1890 and 1891. Their prolific expansion westward across the continent occurred at a tremendous rate of up to 90 km/year. We hypothesized that the individuals leading the expansion wave had longer and pointier wings because these characteristics are associated with greater juvenile dispersal distances. Therefore, we predicted that successive generations of range expanding birds would display increasing wing length and pointedness. Using museum specimens collected in N orth A merica since their introduction, we tested this hypothesis and examined temporal patterns to determine if wing shape changed following the establishment of local populations after the initial colonizing phase. Contrary to our expectations, wing length and shape did not change during the colonization wave. However, the pointedness of European starling wings decreased across the continent by more than 3.8% over the last 120 years. This was caused by an increase in the length of the secondary feathers, not by a decrease in the length of primary feathers. We discuss these results in the context of increased afforestation and urbanization during that time, and the potential benefit of rounder wings for foraging and predator avoidance.
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) | 0.000 | 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".