Gull diets reveal dietary partitioning, influences of isotopic signatures on body condition, and ecosystem changes at a remote colony
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As top predators that feed on a wide range of prey items, gull diets may serve as important biological indicators of regional prey availability and changes in marine ecosystems. We studied the diets of herring gulls Larus argentatus and great black-backed gulls L. marinus on Sable Island, Nova Scotia, Canada, a remote colony which has shown high levels of contaminants in herring gull eggs and which has experienced significant ecological and anthropogenic change in its surrounding marine region over the past 40 yr. Analysis of regurgitated pellets suggested that current gull diets have proportionally less offshore prey (e.g. fish) and terns and tern eggs, and proportionally more molluscs, rock crabs Cancer borealis, and seal Halichoerus grypus carrion than diets sampled 40 yr ago. The composition of recent diets observed from pellet analysis is supported by stable isotope mixing models of carbon ( 13 C) and nitrogen ( 15 N), which revealed that great black-backed gulls had high proportions of seals and crab in their diets, whereas herring gulls had high proportions of crab, sand lance Ammodytes sp., and terrestrial invertebrates. Isotopic analyses also identified dietary variability through seasonal, age-specific and body condition relationships for each species. Biometric-isotope relationships showed that larger great black-backed gulls fed at higher trophic levels, and that higher trophic level foraging in herring gulls was associated with better body condition. Collectively, these results indicate dietary partitioning within this community of sympatrically nesting gulls, and broad-scale dietary shifts since the early 1970s.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".