Indirect, physiological assessment of reproductive state and breeding chronology in free‐living birds: an example in the Marbled Murrelet (<i>Brachyramphus marmoratus</i>)
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract An indirect, physiological method to assess reproductive state in individuals of unknown status is described. The plasma levels of two main yolk precursors, vitellogenin (VTG) and very‐low density lipoproteins (VLDL), are focused on as indices of egg production, for the characterization of fecund females. Data for a species where breeding chronology could be directly assessed, at the population level (Cassin’s Auklet, Ptychoramphus aleuticus ), confirmed the validity of this approach: plasma VTG levels were highest during the defined egg‐laying period, and the highest proportion of females were defined as ‘egg‐producing’ in this period. Analysis of samples for Marbled Murrelets ( Brachyramphus marmoratus ) caught off‐nest (i.e. where all individuals were of unknown status), clearly identified a putative egg‐laying phase, with a single, protracted laying period (cf. multiple‐broodiness). Analysis of body mass confirmed our characterization of ‘egg‐producing’ females: birds with elevated plasma VTG were on average 40 g heavier than other females, equivalent to the mass of the single egg (36–41 g). Indirect, physiological assessment of reproductive state provided valuable information on the breeding biology of Marbled Murrelets which would have been difficult to obtain in any other way (e.g. proportion of fecund females, breeding phenology, single vs multiple‐clutch breeding pattern). Despite some limitations, this technique should be applicable to any oviparous vertebrate population where essential information on breeding biology cannot be obtained by more traditional methods.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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