Molecular Support for Species Status of the Nazca Booby (Sula granti)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Pitman and Jehl (1998) recently argued that Masked Boobies (formerly Sula dactylatra granti) breeding on the Nazca Plate in the eastern Pacific Ocean are morphologically and ecologically distinct from other Masked Boobies and may represent a full species. The American Ornithologists' Union subsequently elevated that subspecies to a full species: the Nazca Booby (S. granti). To evaluate that change in classification, we compared sequence variation in the mitochondrial cytochrome-b gene among 75 Nazca Boobies and 37 Masked Boobies representing three subspecies from the central and eastern Pacific and Atlantic oceans. Results indicated strong differentiation of cytochrome-b variation among taxa. Sequences constituted three distinct groups: Nazca Boobies, Masked Boobies from the central and eastern Pacific (S. d. personata and S. d. californica), and Masked Boobies (S. d. dactylatra) from the Caribbean and Atlantic. Those three groups probably diverged within a very short period, 400,000–500,000 years ago. Our results support the proposal that S. granti represents a distinct species.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".