Bottom-up limitation of a stream salamander in a detritus-based food web
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The indirect effects that resources can have on higher trophic levels remain poorly understood for detritus-based ecosystems. Our objective was to examine effects of long-term terrestrial litter exclusion on a larval salamander, Eurycea wilderae, in a detritus-based stream. After 4 years of exclusion treatment, we conducted a markrecapture study and analyzed gut contents of E. wilderae larvae in the litter exclusion reach, a reach downstream of treatment, and in a reference stream. Eurycea wilderae growth rate (per day), density (individuals per square metre), biomass (milligrams ash-free dry mass per square metre), and production (milligrams ash-free dry mass per square metre per year) were all significantly reduced in the litter exclusion reach. Reduced density in the treatment reach was likely due to elevated hatchling drift driven by reduced prey availability. Larvae from the treatment reach had fewer prey items per gut than larvae in the reference stream and their diet consisted of fewer copepods but more midge larvae, nematodes, and terrestrial insects. The reach downstream of treatment was intermediate between reference and litter exclusion reaches for most measured parameters, indicating residual effects of upstream treatment. Our results provide the first comprehensive evidence of bottom-up limitation of a vertebrate predator in a detritus-based ecosystem and further demonstrate the importance of the terrestrialaquatic linkage.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".