Aberrant Colouration in the Atlantic Puffin (<i>Fratercula arctica</i>), the Common Murre (<i>Uria aalge</i>), and the Thick-billed Murre (<i>U. lomvia</i>) from Atlantic Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The colour of birds’ plumage and bare parts is an important feature in choice of mate, camouflage, thermoregulation, species recognition, and flight mechanics. Abnormalities in colouration occur in a variety of species and can have important consequences for an individual’s survival and fitness. We present 7 new cases of colouration abnormalities in 3 species of auk (Alcidae) and review previous reports to correctly assign the proper form of abnormality to specimens in museums or photographs. Of the 53 reported colouration abnormalities, we reclassified 42, progressive greying being the most common (18 or 19 cases out of 42, 43–45%), followed by brown (10/42 cases, 24%), in addition to 6 cases of melanism, 4 of dilution, 2 of partial leucism, and 1 likely somatic mutation. Properly describing the form of colour abnormality improves our understanding of the frequency, causes, and consequences of aberrant colouration.
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 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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 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 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".