Alternative life-history patterns of estuarine fish: barium in otoliths elucidates freshwater residency
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Elemental concentrations in fish otoliths (earstones) can reconstruct environmental histories of fish if predictable relationships between the environment and elemental incorporation are established. We assessed whether fresh water occupancy of black bream (Acanthopagrus butcheri) can be inferred from otolith barium concentrations (Ba was standardized to calcium (Ca) and expressed as a ratio, Ba:Ca). Otolith Ba:Ca of fish was correlated with ambient Ba:Ca. Using the natural relationships of increasing ambient and otolith Ba:Ca with decreasing salinity, fish from fresh- and salt-water environments were distinguishable. Fish caught in fresh water had approximately double the otolith Ba:Ca of those from salt-water estuaries, for both summer and winter collections. Fish with otolith Ba:Ca ≤5 µmol·mol 1 were classified as resident in salt water, and those with ≥6 µmol·mol 1 as resident in fresh water. Transects of Ba:Ca across fish otoliths classified fish to fresh- or salt-water environments. Fish were identified as having migratory patterns typical of residents, migrants with irregular patterns of diadromy, or migrants with cyclic patterns of anadromomy. Multiple migratory behaviours occurred in fish from the same estuary, indicating far more complex migratory behaviours than were previously known. The application of otolith Ba:Ca to infer freshwater occupancy of fish has rarely been studied, yet may provide more accurate classifications of estuarine environments than strontium (Sr) isotopes and otolith Sr:Ca.
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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) | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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".