Is the timing of moult altered by migration? Evidence from a comparison of age and residency classes of Western Sandpipers Calidris mauri in Panamá
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Resident species typically undergo post-nuptial moult directly following breeding, whereas long-distance migrant species usually do so after arrival at staging or non-breeding ('wintering') grounds. It has been suggested that moult and migration are mutually exclusive activities. If so, one will displace the other in time. We contrasted the moult timing of migrant versus non-migrant Western Sandpipers Calidris mauri, taking advantage of the fact that in Panama, most yearling birds (11-22 months of age), and some adults, were non-migratory summer residents. Yearling birds and other summer residents completed primary moult approximately 3-4 weeks earlier than adults returning from the breeding grounds. The same general pattern occurs with contour moult. Some adults of unknown migratory status also have moult patterns similar to summer residents. We interpret these patterns as indicating that earlier moult is advantageous, partially compensating residents for not migrating and breeding that year. We consider potential mechanisms that may favour an earlier moult, and discuss how moult schedules may influence Western Sandpiper migratory and life history strategies.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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".