Seed size, dispersal, and aerodynamic constraints within the Bombacaceae
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The aerodynamic constraints operating on the wind-dispersed, drag-producing diaspores of several species of the tropical family Bombacaceae were examined. Kapok (the drag-promoting appendage) was best characterized as a moderately flattened hemisphere impervious to air movement. The kapok shape was not isometric: kapok planform area was proportional to the kapok mass raised to the power 0.52 rather than to the 0.67 expected from isometry. Thus, necessarily, terminal velocity rises with seed mass much faster in this group than among taxa with winged seeds. Further, we derived the optimality argument to show that the kapok mass ought to be about 50% of the total diaspore mass (seed plus kapok). While seven of eight species had a lower kapok investment than this, and none were especially close to the theoretically optimal value, nonetheless the kapok investment values were hardly draws from a random distribution. Finally, the kapok fibers of these Bombacaceae species begin to bend at a drag of about 0.005 N, and this sets an upper limit on the efficient diaspore size of about 250 mg for the seed mass. This latter value is similar to the mass of the largest seed we know of in this family.
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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 | 0.002 |
| 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".