Long-term feeding ecology of Great Black-backed Gulls (Larus marinus) in the northwest Atlantic: 110 years of feather isotope data
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recent changes to the ecology of the northwest Atlantic are affecting feeding relationships at many trophic levels. With declining fish stocks and fewer fisheries discards, generalist birds such as Great Black-backed Gulls ( Larus marinus L., 1758) may shift their diets. To test whether such a change has occurred, we measured stable nitrogen and carbon isotope ratios of flight feathers collected from modern and museum-preserved birds (1896–2006). We then compared trends in isotope ratios with trends in regional fisheries productivity to determine if gull diets and fisheries changes were associated. We found a significant decline in stable nitrogen isotope ratios of feathers over time, indicating that the gulls’ trophic feeding level has decreased by approximately 2.26‰, or 0.82 trophic units. In contrast, we found no significant change in carbon isotope ratios, giving no clear evidence for a shift to more offshore or terrestrial foraging. The declining stable nitrogen ratio was significantly and positively correlated with both regional groundfish captures and regional fisheries trophic level, and was negatively correlated with each of (i) crab captures and (ii) herring, sardine, and anchovy captures. Our study gives evidence for a shift in diets of Great Black-backed Gulls over time and further suggests that these changes may be related to ongoing changes in fisheries.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".