Linking contaminant profiles to the diet and breeding location of American dippers using stable isotopes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Summary Individual variation in contaminant levels is a common occurrence in many toxicology studies, but the exact cause is often unclear. We investigated the influence of diet and breeding location on individual bird contaminant profiles using a colour‐marked population of American dippers Cinclus mexicanus . The population comprised two distinct groups within a single river system: resident dippers breeding on the main river and altitudinal migrants breeding on tributaries. Residue analysis revealed that total organochlorines (OC), polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB) and mercury (Hg) were all significantly higher in eggs from river residents compared with tributary migrants. This trend was also apparent for the three most prevalent organochlorine compounds: p , p ′‐dichlorodiphenyl‐dichloroethylene (DDE), hexachlorobenzene and trans ‐nonachlor. We hypothesized that the observed differences in contaminant concentrations were partially related to the proportion of salmon fry Oncorhynchus spp. in the diet relative to aquatic invertebrates. Stable isotope analyses using δ 13 C and δ 15 N were conducted on blood and feathers of dippers in addition to aquatic invertebrates and salmon fry prey. Linear mixing models using the 15 N isotope in the dippers’ diet and blood revealed considerable variability in the proportion of fish consumed (0–71%). Resident dippers on the main river ate significantly higher proportions of fish (42%) than tributary migrants (22%) ( P = 0·01). The difference in diet between migratory groups explained some of the observed variation in egg contaminant profiles, as total OC ( P = 0·002) in dipper eggs was positively correlated with blood δ 15 N values, indicating fish may be the primary source of contamination. Synthesis and applications . We conclude that dipper eggs represent local conditions at the breeding site, making them useful tools for biomonitoring aquatic contaminants in watersheds. However, given the distinct difference in contaminant profiles between resident and migrant dippers and the link with diet, the results emphasize the importance of understanding individual species’ ecology for assessing toxicological effects at the population level.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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".