Sea urchin fecal production and accumulation in a rocky subtidal ecosystem
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We used a spatial model of destructive grazing of kelp beds by dense aggregations (fronts) of sea urchins Strongylocentrotus droebachiensis, together with measures of sea urchin absorption efficiency and fecal degradation rate, to predict rates of fecal production and accumulation during the transition from a kelp bed to a barrens state in a rocky subtidal ecosystem of Nova Scotia, Canada. The rate of fecal production as dry mass reached 9.17 g m -2 d -1 at 10 yr after the formation of a grazing front, with associated rates of carbon and nitrogen production of 2.12 g C m -2 d -1 and 0.21 g N m -2 d -1 . Fecal production rate exceeded the rates of physical, chemical, and microbial degradation, such that up to 193.6 g of feces, 70.2 g of C, and 4.0 g of N accumulated per linear m of front after 10 yr. The extent of sea urchin grazing fronts along the Atlantic coast of Nova Scotia was estimated at 280 km in 2000, which translates to a total fecal production rate of 6423 kg of feces d -1 and an accumulation of 54 200 kg of feces after 10 yr of front formation, based on our model. This temporally variable flux of organic matter likely has a profound effect on adjacent deeper-water macrobenthic communities utilizing the feces as a food source.
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.
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 it