Optic Foramen Morphology and Activity Pattern in Birds
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The optic nerve is the sole output of visual information from the ganglion cell layer of the retina to the brain in vertebrates. The size of the optic nerve is predicted to be closely associated with activity pattern, and, in many birds, the size of the optic foramen approximates the size of the optic nerve. Specifically, nocturnal species should have relatively smaller optic foramina than diurnal species because of differences in retinal pooling between activity patterns. If optic foramen morphology varies predictably with activity pattern in birds, this variable may be useful for interpreting activity pattern for birds that do not have soft tissue available for study, specifically for fossils. Across 177 families (from 27 orders), we describe four different optic foramen morphologies, only one of which corresponds well with the size of the optic nerve and is therefore appropriate for activity pattern analyses. Here, we test our hypothesis that nocturnal species will have relatively smaller optic foramina than diurnal species, across all species that we measured that have a discrete optic foramen. Regression analyses using species as independent data points and using comparative methods yielded significant differences in optic foramen size between nocturnal and diurnal species relative to three variables: head length, orbit depth, and sclerotic ring inner diameter. Nocturnal species consistently exhibit significantly smaller relative optic foramen diameters than diurnal species. Our results indicate that optic foramen diameter, in combination with either the sclerotic ring or the orbit diameter, can be used to predict activity pattern.
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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".