Effects of Caddisfly Grazers on the Elemental Composition of Epilithon in a Boreal Lake
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We examined how the intensity of benthic grazing affects the C:P stoichiometry of epilithon in an oligotrophic lake at the Experimental Lakes Area in northwestern Ontario, Canada. Caddisflies were enclosed over natural epilithon to compare epilithic C:P ratios along a grazer gradient (0, 1, 4, and 9 individuals/700 cm<sup>2</sup> enclosure) after 10 and 20 d. We also examined mechanisms that potentially explain changes in epilithic C:P ratios at different grazer levels by estimating algal biomass and taxonomic composition. After 10 d, no differences in epilithic C:P ratios were found among grazer levels. However, after 20 d, epilithic C:P ratios (∼500) at high grazer levels (9/enclosure) were significantly lower than C:P ratios (∼1200) in grazer-free enclosures. We also found that algal biomass was significantly reduced under intense grazing. No significant effects of grazer level were detected on epilithic C:chlorophyll ratios, the % contribution of algal C to epilithic organic C, or the taxonomic composition of algal communities after 10 or 20 d. In addition, only ∼2 to 3% of epilithic C was estimated to be in benthic algae throughout the experiment. These results indicate that differences in epilithic C:P ratios caused by increased grazing intensity cannot be explained by changes in prevalence of different organic C pools (detritus and algae) comprising the epilithon, changes in the nutrient content of algae, or by the taxonomic composition of the algal community. Factors affecting the nutrient content of detritus likely account for the lower epilithic C:P ratios found in highly grazed enclosures.
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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 | 0.000 | 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) | 0.001 | 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 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".