Environmentally Relevant Concentrations of DE-71 and HBCD Alter Eggshell Thickness and Reproductive Success of American Kestrels
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) and total alpha-hexabromocyclododecane (HBCD) are flame-retardant additives that are commonly used in household and commercial applications. PBDE congeners, which are comprised of technical mixtures such as DE-71, are globally persistent and their concentrations are increasing in many species. Captive American kestrels (Falco sparverius) were exposed by diet to vehicle (safflower oil), or one of two environmentally relevant concentrations of DE-71 and unintentionally to HBCD. This exposure resulted in the birds laying eggs that contain PBDE and HBCD concentrations currently found in wild herring gull (Larus argentatus) and peregrine falcon (F. peregrinus) eggs, and compared to control kestrels, resulted in delayed egg laying and smaller eggs being laid, caused thinner eggshells and differential weight loss during embryonic development, and reduced fertility and reproductive success. The thickness of the eggshell declined as the concentrations of all measured PBDE and the total amount of a-HBCD congeners (except BDE-183 and BDE-209) increased; increasing concentrations of BDE-153, BDE-154, BDE-28, BDE-17, delayed egg laying, reduced eggshell mass (plus sigmaPBDEs), and reduced fledging success (BDE-153 and BDE-154 only). BDE-153 is the dominant congener recently found in peregrine eggs. The results of this study are consistent with the PBDE-associated brood reduction in wild European peregrines and may partially explain the decline of kestrels in North America.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".