Pesticides in blood from spectacled caiman (<i>Caiman crocodilus</i>) downstream of banana plantations in Costa Rica
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Spectacled caiman (Caiman crocodilus) are fish-eating crocodilians that inhabit freshwater habitat in tropical regions of the Americas. To assess the exposure of caiman to pesticides from banana plantations, the authors collected whole blood samples (30 mL) from 14 adult caiman that were captured in the North Atlantic region of Costa Rica. Blood samples were analyzed for 70 legacy- and current-use pesticides and breakdown products using newly developed ultra-trace, high-resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS). Caiman accumulated pesticides ranked by concentration as dieldrin > permethrin > mirex > 4,4'-DDE > alpha-endosulfan > heptachlor epoxide > oxychlordane > heptachlor > cypermethrin. Caiman within the high-intensity banana crop watershed of Rio Suerte had higher pesticide burdens relative to other more remote locations (F = 12.79; p = 0.00). Pesticide concentration decreased with distance from upstream banana plantations in this river system (F = 20.76; p = 0.00). Caiman body condition was negatively correlated with total pesticide concentrations (F = 6.23; p = 0.02) and with proximity to banana plantations (F = 5.05; p = 0.04). This suggests that either pesticides elicited toxic effects in caiman, resulting in diminished overall health, or that the quantity or quality of their prey was reduced by pesticides downstream of plantation waterways. The authors' results indicate that pesticide use in banana plantations is impacting a high trophic level species inhabiting one of the most important wilderness areas in Costa Rica (Tortuguero National Park).
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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) | 0.013 | 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".