Salinity influences the distribution of marine snakes: implications for evolutionary transitions to marine life
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Secondary transitions from terrestrial to marine life provide remarkable examples of evolutionary change. Although the maintenance of osmotic balance poses a major challenge to secondarily marine vertebrates, its potential role during evolutionary transitions has not been assessed. In the current study, we investigate the role of oceanic salinity as a proximate physiological challenge for snakes during the phylogenetic transition from the land to the sea. Large‐scale biogeographical analyses using the four extant lineages of marine snakes suggest that salinity constrains their current distribution, especially in groups thought to resemble early transitional forms between the land and the sea. Analyses at the species‐level suggest that a more efficient salt‐secreting gland allows a species to exploit more saline, and hence larger, oceanic areas. Salinity also emerged as the strongest predictor of sea snake richness. Snake species richness was negatively correlated with mean annual salinity, but positively correlated with monthly variation in salinity. We infer that all four independent transitions from terrestrial to marine life in snakes may have occurred in the Indonesian Basin, where salinity is low and seasonally variable. More generally, osmoregulatory challenges may have influenced the evolutionary history and ecological traits of other secondarily marine vertebrates (turtles, birds and mammals) and may affect the impact of climate change on marine vertebrates.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 it