First Record of a Broad-billed Prion Pachyptila Vittata at Coronation Island, South Orkney Islands
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The known breeding distribution of Broad-billed Prions Pachyptila vittata is restricted to Tristan da Cunha and Gough Islands in the South Atlantic Ocean and to offshore islands around New Zealand and the Snares and Chatham Islands, with the range at sea believed to extend to coastal South Africa in the South Atlantic Ocean and near-shore waters around New Zealand (Marchant & Higgins 1990). The taxonomy of prions remains controversial, with most authors recognising up to six species, but varying numbers of subspecies. The at-sea ranges of many Southern Ocean seabird species are still incompletely described, with relatively few surveys obtaining at-sea data for prions. Here, we report an observation of a Broadbilled Prion at the South Orkney Islands, approximately equidistant between the two known breeding distributions for this species. On 9 December 2006, while surveying Adelie Penguin Pygoscelis adeliae colonies at Shingle Cove (60°39′S 45°20′W), Coronation Island, South Orkney Islands, we found the skull of a Broad-billed Prion on a coastal terrace below a steep scree bluff. Discarded wings and skeletal remains, primarily of Antarctic Prions P. desolata, were plentiful along the base of the bluffs behind the penguin colonies because of depredation by the five or more breeding pairs of Subantarctic Skuas Catharacta lonnbergi present. We were unable to collect the skull for formal identification because we had no collection permit, but we are confident of the identification because of the unique and unmistakable bill morphology of this species. For Broad-billed Prions, bill widths exceed 20 mm; this width contrasts with the much narrower bill (widths typically < 15 mm) of the Antarctic Prions present at this site. In addition, one of us (EJW) has had extensive experience handling and measuring Antarctic and Fulmar P. crassirostris Prions at Heard Island (Woehler 1991), and both authors have had considerable experience with observing all species of prions at sea. This individual may have arrived at the South Orkney Islands as either a beach-washed carcass that was later scavenged by skuas,
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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 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.002 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".