Bibliographic record
Abstract
The questionable assertions in the letter by Blaustein and Kats do not alter, in my belief, the primary conclusions in my article (Licht 2003). The first is that most studies (Licht 2003, table 2) have found no significant mortality in embryos after exposure to ambient levels of UVB. Blaustein and Kats do not dispute this conclusion; instead, they argue now that “the most severe problems caused by UVB may come after hatching.” I am aware of recent studies that report slower growth rates but no severe abnormalities in five species of laboratory-reared tadpoles exposed as embryos to ambient UVB. However, the biological significance of such a presumed UVB posthatch effect considered within a complex, outdoor setting is unclear. Moreover, if future studies on possible sublethal effects underestimate the importance of variables that realistically reduce UVB exposure (egg jelly, natural oviposition sites, dissolved organic carbon), the relevance of their findings to natural conditions will be greatly diminished. Even without data from thousands of unstudied species, my “naïve” evolutionary scenario of aquatic breeding amphibians can explain egg mass size, shape, and placement in relation to both UVB exposure and heat acquisition. How robust is the notion of Blaustein and Kats that increasing levels of UVB are unprecedented and are a relatively recent selection pressure, given millions of years of amphibian evolution and the manifest effectiveness of their UVB defenses? The second conclusion is that the link between increasing UVB and amphibian population decline remains conjecture with no substantial evidence, from either presumed lethal or sublethal effects, to support it. I stand by those conclusions.
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 | 0.002 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.047 | 0.028 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.062 | 0.035 |
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".