DO NORTH AMERICAN MONARCH BUTTERFLIES TRAVEL TO CUBA? STABLE ISOTOPE AND CHEMICAL TRACER TECHNIQUES
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since the discovery of monarch butterfly ( Danaus plexippus ) overwintering colonies in Mexico in the 1970s, it was assumed that monarchs from eastern North America migrated only to Mexico. This paper reveals that monarchs from Canada and the east coast of the United States also regularly travel to Cuba during the migration period. The natal grounds of Cuban monarchs were determined through the combined use of stable hydrogen (δD) and stable carbon (δ 13 C) isotope measurements and by cardenolide fingerprint analysis using thin‐layer chromatography (TLC). The TLC data revealed that there was an influx of migrants in November to Cuba, and the stable isotope data revealed that migrant Cuban monarchs originated from southeastern Canada and the eastern United States. Our findings suggest that North American migrant monarchs that move to Cuba hybridize with resident populations there and do not return to the continent. The differences in the natal grounds, migratory route, and reproductive stages between monarchs wintering in Mexico and Cuba suggest that there are at least two subpopulations of eastern North American monarchs. The extent to which Cuba may act as a bridge for monarch movement to the Yucatan and other Caribbean islands and the genetic impact of this newly revealed flux in monarch movements remain to be determined.
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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".