Wing and Body Molts of Male Red-Breasted Mergansers in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Little is known of the chronology of wing molt and the intensity of body molt among flightless Red-breasted Mergansers (Mergus serrator) in North America. We examined molt of 39 postbreeding males collected at Anticosti Island, Québec, Canada, from July to September 2005 and 2006. We estimated that birds were flightless for 30-33 days. Nearly 75% of males initiated the flightless period between 20 July and 3 August, and >90% were flightless from 8 to 25 August. Subadult males became flightless slightly earlier ( = 28 July; n = 7) than adult males ( = 1 August; n = 28). Most of the head and neck attained the cryptic alternate plumage before remiges were lost, consistent with observations at a nearby breeding site in eastern New Brunswick, where >75% of adult males were undergoing prealternate molt on the head region by late June. Molt intensities declined on the side, collar, and back and increased on the belly and tail throughout the period of flightlessness. Greater coverts generally molted in synchrony with new flight feathers, and most median and lesser coverts initiated replacement within 10 days of loss of remiges. This study provides evidence that the prealternate molt functions effectively to replace bright upperpart feathers with cryptic plumage prior to the flightless period. We suggest that the staggered pattern of molt among feather regions may minimize nutritional and energetic demands associated with feather replacement and changes in plumage insulation among flightless male Red-breasted Mergansers in the upper Gulf of St. Lawrence.
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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".