Explaining patterns of deformity in freshwater turtles using MacCulloch’s hypothesis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A growing body of literature details the effects of teratogenic chemicals on embryonic development in freshwater turtles. However, other factors affecting developmental deformities have not been recently considered and evaluation of the significance of deformities in adults is lacking. We collected 193 wild Midland Painted Turtles ( Chrysemys picta marginata Agassiz, 1857) and 39 Common Snapping Turtles (Chelydra serpentina (L., 1758)) from an uncontaminated site in Ontario and recorded incidence of deformity of the shell, limbs, face, and tail. We tested MacCulloch’s hypothesis (that incidence of deformity increases along a latitudinal gradient) by comparing our data with previously published deformity records from both uncontaminated and heavily polluted sites at varying latitudes. Incidence of nonembryonic deformity varied among wild populations and was not correlated with pollution levels. Thus adult deformity cannot be used as an indicator of site quality. Frequency of deformity increased with latitude in C. picta, supporting MacCulloch’s hypothesis, whereas deformities in C. serpentina did not. We refer to essential differences in the biology of the two species to explain this disparity and recommend that latitudinal variation be included as a covariate in the future when developmental trends are compared among distant sites.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".