Interactive effects of road salt and leaf litter on wood frog sex ratios and sexual size dimorphism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Myriad natural and anthropogenic chemicals alter aquatic vertebrate sex ratios, with implications for population dynamics. Despite 22 million metric tons of salt applied to US roads annually, with much of it entering aquatic environments, it is unknown whether salt impacts sex ratios. Moreover, changes in forest composition co-occur with increased road salt application, dramatically changing ecosystems. We explore how road salt (sodium chloride) and two leaf litter types might influence amphibian development. By examining wood frog (Rana sylvatica = Lithobates sylvaticus) metamorphs reared with different combinations of salt (114 and 867 mg Cl·L −1 ) and litter species (none, maple (Acer rubrum), oak (Quercus spp.)), we show that salt masculinizes tadpole sex ratios, whereas oak, but not maple, litter feminizes populations. Road salt addition eliminates sexual dimorphism in oak-reared tadpoles, but enhances sexual size dimorphisms in maple-reared tadpoles, producing larger females. We are the first to show that road salt and native tree leaf litter manipulates vertebrate sex ratios and sex-specific development. Human land use might therefore influence vertebrate development through direct effects of contamination and indirect effects of altered botanical composition.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".