Effects of Climate-Induced Changes in Parasitism, Predation and Predator-Predator Interactions on Reproduction and Survival of an Arctic Marine Bird
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A detailed understanding of the processes and interactions within biological communities is needed to describe and predict the biological consequences of climate change. Global warming may affect biological communities at specific sites through changes in the species composition that follow changes in range, or through altered food web interactions caused by changes in phenology or behaviour. We describe the demographic consequences for a colonial nesting seabird, the Thick-billed Murre (Uria lomvia), of exceptionally intense mosquito parasitism and predation by polar bears in a particular year. Increases in mosquito parasitism and bear predation are changes in behaviour rather than changes in range, and both caused unusual adult mortality and reproductive failure in Thick-billed Murres. In the case of adult mortality, the effects of predation and parasitism were complementary, whereas in the case of reproductive failure, most birds affected by parasitism would in any case have subsequently lost their eggs to bear predation. The mosquito and bear activities had the secondary result of redirecting the attention of gulls and foxes, the usual predators of murre eggs, towards scavenging carcasses and preying on eggs exposed by birds deserting their ledges. This diversion reduced the impact of gulls and foxes on the murres and altered the spatial configuration of predation risk. Our observations emphasize the difficulty faced by ecologists in predicting the consequences of global warming even for simple and relatively well-studied ecosystems. Moreover, the net effect of combined parasitism and predation was much greater than reported previously, reducing overall colony productivity by 20% and increasing adult mortality by 20%. If this effect happens every year, it will have population consequences.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".