Plumage and Body Size Differentiation in Blue-Winged Teal and Cinnamon teal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Blue-winged Teal (Anas discors) and Cinnamon Teal (A. cyanoptera septentrionalium) are two closely related North American dabbling duck species that are ecological equivalents. Cinnamon Teal are primarily restricted to regions west of the Great Plains, whereas Blue-winged Teal occur primarily in the central and eastern part of the continent, only recently expanding westward. Males of the two species exhibit striking plumage color differences, while females are difficult to differentiate by plumage, and it is unclear if interspecific size differences exist between either sex due to inconsistencies in previous reports. Here we reassess body size differences, and quantify plumage color differences using avian color discrimination modeling. Like previous studies, significant differences were found for bill morphology; mean bill length was 7-10% longer in Cinnamon Teal. Based on avian visual modeling of plumage reflectance data, color differences not visible to human vision were found between species for several female feather patches (e.g. breast coloration) and male wing speculum coloration, potentially representing previously unrecognized interspecific signals to the avian visual system. Although color reflectance data yielded higher accuracy than morphometrics for identifying females, body size measurements (in addition to plumage to a lesser degree) also proved to be reliable in correctly classifying males of each species. In combination, morphometrics and plumage reflectance data represent useful identification tools for avian species that are otherwise difficult to distinguish.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".