A new method to reconstruct fish diet and movement patterns from δ<sup>13</sup>C values in otolith amino acids
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Fish ecologists have used geochemical values in otoliths to examine habitat use, migration, and population connectivity for decades. However, it remains difficult to determine an unambiguous dietary δ 13 C signature from bulk analysis of otolith. Studies to date have focused on the aragonite component of otoliths with less attention paid to the organic fraction. We describe the application of compound-specific stable isotope analysis (SIA) to analyze amino acid (AA) δ 13 C values from small amounts (<1 mg) of otolith powder. We examined δ 13 C values of otolith and muscle AAs from a reef-associated snapper (Lutjanus ehrenbergii (Peters, 1869)) collected along a carbon isotope gradient (isoscape) from seagrass beds to coral reefs. Carbon isotope values in otolith and muscle samples were highly correlated within and among coastal habitats. Moreover, δ 13 C values of otolith AAs provided a purely dietary record that avoided dilution from dissolved inorganic carbon. Otolith AAs served as a robust tracer of δ 13 C values at the base of the food web, making compound-specific SIA a powerful tool for dietary reconstructions and tracking the movement of fishes across isoscapes.
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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) | 0.000 | 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) | 0.003 | 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".