A description of the gross pathology of drowning and other causes of mortality in seabirds
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Mortality of seabirds due to anthropogenic causes, especially entrapment in fishing gear, is a matter of increasing international concern. This study aimed at characterising the gross pathology of seabirds that drowned in fishing nets and comparing it with that in other common causes of mortality. RESULTS: Post-mortem examinations were performed on 103 common guillemots, 32 razorbills, 37 shags and 5 great northern divers found stranded in Cornwall during 1981-2016. Pathology in birds that died in confirmed incidents of drowning in fishing nets (n = 95) was compared with that in cases of suspected drowning (n = 6), oil (n = 53) and polyisobutylene (PIB) (n = 3) pollution, adverse weather (n = 6) and stranding of unknown cause (14). The majority of drowned birds were in good nutritional state, freshly dead and approximately 50% had freshly ingested fish in their proximal gut. Principle lesions were: gross distention of the heart and major veins with dark blood, intensely congested, swollen and oedematous lungs which released white frothy fluid when excised, watery fluid in the air sacs that ranged from clear to deep red depending on state of carcase preservation. PIB-affected birds were in good nutritional state; their pathology was largely consistent with that in confirmed drowning cases; it is likely that drowning was the ultimate cause of death. Birds affected by oil, adverse weather or that stranded due to unknown cause were all in poor or emaciated condition, the mean body mass of the guillemots and razorbills being, respectively, 53 and 57% of those that drowned. They had little or no food in their alimentary tracts and many showed evidence of enteric inflammation, haemorrhage and ulceration. None had fluid in their air sacs and none showed significant cardio-respiratory system lesions. CONCLUSIONS: Drowned birds consistently showed a distinctive set of gross pathological lesions. When combined with contemporaneous observations, the pathology may be sufficient to permit a diagnosis of drowning, especially where a batch of freshly dead birds are examined. The observations in this study are likely to be of value when investigating stranding incidents, particularly where it is suspected that legislation aimed at protecting seabirds is not being complied with.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".