Small Tails Tell Tall Tales – Intra-Individual Variation in the Stable Isotope Values of Fish Fin
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Fish fin is a widely used, non-lethal sample material in studies using stable isotopes to assess the ecology of fishes. However, fish fin is composed of two distinct tissues (ray and membrane) which may have different stable isotope values and are not homogeneously distributed within a fin. As such, estimates of the stable isotope values of a fish may vary according to the section of fin sampled. METHODS: To assess the magnitude of this variation, we analysed carbon (δ13C), nitrogen (δ15N), hydrogen (δ2H) and oxygen (δ18O) stable isotopes of caudal fin from juvenile, riverine stages of Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) and brown trout (Salmo trutta). Individual fins were sub-sectioned into tip, mid and base, of which a further subset were divided into ray and membrane. FINDINGS: Isotope variation between fin sections, evident in all four elements, was primarily related to differences between ray and membrane. Base sections were13C depleted relative to tip (~1‰) with equivalent variation evident between ray and membrane. A similar trend was evident in δ2H, though the degree of variation was far greater (~10‰). Base and ray sections were 18O enriched (~2‰) relative to tip and membrane, respectively. Ray and membrane sections displayed longitudinal variation in 15N mirroring that of composite fin (~1‰), indicating that variation in15N values was likely related to ontogenetic variation. CONCLUSIONS: To account for the effects of intra-fin variability in stable isotope analyses we suggest that researchers sampling fish fin, in increasing priority, 1) also analyse muscle (or liver) tissue from a subsample of fish to calibrate their data, or 2) standardize sampling by selecting tissue only from the extreme tip of a fin, or 3) homogenize fins prior to analysis.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 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".