Causes of bimodal stable isotope signatures in the feathers of a molt-migrant songbird
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Stable isotope ratios of hydrogen (δD) and carbon (δ13C) in feathers collected from Painted Buntings ( Passerina ciris (L., 1758)) breeding in the midwestern United States revealed a surprising degree of variation in δD, as well as a clear bimodal signal in δ13C in the innermost primary feather. Because this population does not molt on the breeding grounds, we reasoned that these observations could be due (i) to birds migrating to two (or possibly more) distinct molting areas or (ii) to differences in the timing of molt (as opposed to molt location) relative to arrival at the stopover site. To evaluate these hypotheses, we collected feathers at a molting location in northwestern Mexico, which revealed patterns similar to those from the birds in the US (favoring the second hypothesis above). We suspect that some birds arrive at stopover sites and begin molting before their body tissues equilibrate to the new isoscape so that the first feathers grown represent a blend of materials from the breeding and stopover locations. Other birds may delay molt after arriving at the molting site, allowing them to equilibrate with the local isoscape and produce feathers with isotope signatures of the molting location.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 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 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".