The Design, Construction, and Operation of a Whole-Body Inhalation Chamber for Use in Avian Toxicity Studies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Environmental risk assessments are broadening to include evaluations of avian species exposed to gaseous and particulate materials (Mineau, 2002b; Irvine, 2004; Carmalt, 2005). Since the avian respiratory tract is fundamentally different from the respiratory tract of rodents, the effects of gaseous materials on birds cannot validly be extrapolated from data derived from rodent exposure studies (Briant & Driver, 1992; Brown et al., 1997). To address the lack of avian-specific lowest observable effect levels used to calculate reference concentrations for airborne pollutants, a system was designed to facilitate research on inhalation toxicology in small birds. Birds have long been used as early indicators of poor air quality (Brown et al., 1997), and various chambers have been designed for head only exposures of larger birds (Briant & Driver, 1992). Smaller birds with short tracheal lengths and hooked beaks however require less restrictive exposure apparatus, thus warranting the proposed design. The chamber described in this article was designed to accommodate a small falcon, the American kestrel, a species frequently used in toxicological risk assessments (Wiemeyer & Lincer, 1987a; Smits & Bortolotti, 2001; Bortolotti et al., 2003; Fisher et al., 2006). To accomplish this, a 41-L closed inhalation system capable of exposing 12 adult American kestrels was constructed primarily of galvanized steel, polyvinyl chloride, and copper tubing. Humidified air was passed over the birds and subsequently decontaminated by an activated carbon filter and released to a HEPA filtration system. The proposed inhalation chamber was successfully used in 2005 and 2006 to expose a total of 55 male American kestrels to benzene and toluene. Measurements of various biochemical endpoints associated with benzene and toluene toxicity allowed us to study the effects of airborne pollutants on small nondomesticated birds in a controlled laboratory setting.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.002 |
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".