SITE FIDELITY IS AN INCONSISTENT DETERMINANT OF POPULATION STRUCTURE IN THE HOODED MERGANSER (<i>LOPHODYTES CUCULLATUS</i>): EVIDENCE FROM GENETIC, MARK–RECAPTURE, AND COMPARATIVE DATA
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The level of site fidelity in birds is often characterized as "high" on the basis of rates of return or homing from mark–recapture data. For species that exhibit site fidelity, subsequent biological assumptions have included population structure, demographic independence, and that the extirpation of a site-faithful group might be irreversible because of low immigration. Yet several genetic studies have observed patterns of population differentiation that are incongruous with strong site fidelity, which suggests recent isolation, gene flow, or both. Using a 13-year live-recapture and dead-recovery data set, as well as nuclear and mitochondrial DNA collected across the range of the Hooded Merganser (Lophodytes cucullatus), an obligate cavity-nester endemic to North America, we found evidence that gene flow persists across portions of the species' range even though the probability of female breeding-site fidelity is high (0.92; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.64–0.98) and disjunct breeding ranges of this species have been isolated for ≥10,000 years. By combining inferences from genetic, band-recovery, mark–recapture, and comparative data from another cavity-nesting species of waterfowl, we conclude that a high level of site fidelity should not be considered a universal proxy for population structure and demographic independence. Our results also suggest that an accurate assessment of site fidelity—and its implications for population dynamics and delineation—requires cross-species comparisons and multiple data types, such as mark–recapture and genetic information, to best infer patterns across a range of geographic and temporal scales.
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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) | 0.000 | 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".