Variation in Primary Molt in the Least Auklet
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Along with breeding and migration, molt is one of the most energetically expensive components of a bird's annual cycle. Auklets (tribe Aethiini) are apparently unique among the Alcidae in that flight-feather molt and breeding overlap. We compared the degree of overlap of primary molt with breeding in the Least Auklet (Aethia pusilla) at four colonies in varying oceanographic environments: Kiska Island (Aleutian Islands, Alaska, 52°N), St. George Island (Pribilof Islands, Alaska, 56°N), St. Paul Island (Pribilof Islands, 57°N), and Cape Ulyakhpen (Chukotka Peninsula, Russia, 64°N). We hypothesized that the onset and speed of feather replacement should be related to latitude or sea-ice dynamics. Flight-feather molt commenced during incubation with up to four primaries replaced by the end of chick rearing. At Kiska, we found no difference in molt rate between adult breeders and nonbreeders, but subadults started molt after adults and were more variable in when they started primary molt. At higher latitudes adult auklets replaced their first four primaries faster and initiated molt later although the length of the breeding season was similar. The increased energetic requirements of Least Auklets breeding and molting at higher latitudes are supported by the cold Anadyr Current, which advects lipid-rich oceanic copepods (Neocalanus spp.). In the Least Auklet and other members of the Aethiini, sequential primary molt, rather than the simultaneous molt typical of other alcids, may be possible because of auklets' lower body mass, lower wing loading, mass loss at hatching, and foraging on highly abundant prey.
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 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) | 0.003 | 0.005 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".