Characterising ontogenetic niche shifts in Nile crocodile using stable isotope (δ<sup>13</sup>C, δ<sup>15</sup>N) analyses of scute keratin
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Nile crocodiles undergo a three to five order of magnitude increase in body size during their lifespan. This shift coincides with a change in resource and habitat use which influences the strength, type and symmetry of interactions with other species. Identifying size-specific crocodile groups displaying similar traits is important for conservation planning. Here, we illustrate how stable carbon (δ(13) C) and nitrogen (δ(15) N) isotope analysis of scute keratin, together with breakpoint modelling analysis can be used to characterise ontogenetic niche shifts. Using a sample set of 238 crocodiles from the Okavango Delta, Botswana (35-463 cm total length), we found prominent size-related changes in the scute keratin δ(13) C and δ(15) N profiles close to 40 and 119 cm snout-vent length. The first shift corroborated the findings of a traditional stomach-content study conducted on the same population at the same time, and the second conformed to known crocodile ecology. This approach can be used as a first approximation to identify size-specific groups within crocodile populations, and these can then be investigated further using isotopic or other methods.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".