Mercury Exposure is Associated with Negative Effects on Turtle Reproduction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Mercury (Hg), a ubiquitous and highly toxic bioaccumulative contaminant, can maternally transfer and elicit deleterious effects on adult reproduction and offspring phenotype in fish, amphibians, and birds. However, the effects of Hg on reproduction remain largely unstudied in reptiles. We evaluated the consequences of maternally transferred Hg on a long-lived aquatic omnivore, the common snapping turtle (Chelydra serpentina). We collected eggs and tissues from gravid female turtles along a broad Hg contamination gradient in a river in central Virginia. We incubated eggs in the laboratory, quantified embryonic mortality, infertility, and hatching success of each clutch, and assessed all hatchlings and dead embryos for gross morphological malformations. As predicted, Hg concentrations in eggs were strongly and positively correlated with Hg levels in female tissues. We found that Hg in eggs was negatively correlated with hatching success, and this effect was driven by both increased egg infertility and embryonic mortality. In comparison to previous effect-based studies on other amniotes, our findings suggest that C. serpentina may be more resilient to Hg exposure and perhaps better suited for long-term monitoring of bioavailability of Hg than as indicators of adverse effects.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.003 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".