Recovery of the Ancient Murrelet Synthliboramphus Antiquus Colony on Langara Island, British Columbia, Following Eradication of Invasive Rats
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recovery of the Ancient Murrelet Synthliboramphus antiquus colony on Langara Island, British Columbia, following eradication of invasive rats.Marine Ornithology 35: 137-144.Ancient Murrelets Synthliboramphus antiquus were nearly extirpated, and five other burrow-nesting species were extirpated from Langara Island, British Columbia, following introduction of first Black Rats Rattus rattus and later Norway Rats R. norvegicus.Rats were eradicated in 1995.To document the apparent response of Ancient Murrelets to introduced rats and to their removal, we compared colony surveys on Langara Island before (1981, 1988, 1993) and after (1999, 2004) rat eradication.We used surveys on two other colonies with rats, and five without rats, as approximate controls.Colony area decreased and burrow density increased on Langara Island in the presence of rats.Four years after rat removal, those trends had reversed.By 2004, the Ancient Murrelet colony had expanded to twice its pre-eradication area (to 61 ha from 29 ha), but burrow density had decreased (to 625 burrows/ha from 1800 burrows/ha) such that the number of burrows in the colony (38 176 in 2004) did not increase noticeably.Overall, the estimated breeding population almost doubled between 1999 (13 014 ± 2525) and 2004 (24 037 ± 4073) primarily because of an increase in burrow occupancy relative to all previous surveys (to an average of 63% from 35%), and was similar to that in other rat-free colonies.Cassin's Auklets Ptychoramphus aleuticus, that also had been extirpated from the island by rats, recolonized the island following rat eradication.Comparison with other colonies with and without invasive rats corroborated our conclusion that the Ancient Murrelet colony was responding positively to a successful rat eradication, and that we are beginning to achieve our goal of restoring Langara Island as an important seabird breeding colony.
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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 | 0.001 | 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".