Isotopic homogeneity of breath CO<sub>2</sub> from fasting and berry-eating polar bears: implications for tracing reliance on terrestrial foods in a changing Arctic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
With a changing Arctic climate, it is important to know whether polar bears ( Ursus maritimus Phipps, 1774) can supplement their stored fat reserves by intake of terrestrial berries. Although polar bears are known to consume berries while on land, it has been difficult to quantify their relative dependence on stored adipose tissue and berry carbohydrates to meet their energy needs. We sampled breath CO2 from 300 bears fasting on land in western Hudson Bay during the open-water seasons of 1997 and 1998 and analyzed this breath for stable carbon isotope (δ13C) values. We found no difference in the bear breath δ13C values for bears known to have recently fed on berries and those that had not. The distribution of δ13C values was remarkably tight with average values ranging from –24.2‰ to –24.8‰ with no effect of age, sex, or year of capture. This result was counter to our simple isotopic discrimination model that predicted bears metabolizing adipose tissue derived from seals would have breath δ13C values close to –24.7‰ and those metabolizing berries exclusively would have values close to –32.6‰. If correct, our results suggests that the bears which had fed on berries while fasting on land received an insignificant amount of energetic benefit.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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) | 0.001 | 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".