Anatomical evidence for scent guided foraging in the turkey vulture
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) is a widespread, scavenging species in the Western Hemisphere that locates carrion by smell. Scent guided foraging is associated with an expansion of the olfactory bulbs of the brain in vertebrates, but no such neuroanatomical data exists for vultures. We provide the first measurements of turkey vulture brains, including the size of their olfactory bulbs and numbers of mitral cells, which provide the primary output of the olfactory bulbs. Comparative analyses show that the turkey vulture has olfactory bulbs that are 4× larger and contain twice as many mitral cells as those of the sympatric black vulture (Coragyps atratus), despite having brains that are 20% smaller. The turkey vulture has the largest olfactory bulbs in absolute terms and adjusted for brain size among birds, but the number of mitral cells is proportional to the size of their olfactory bulbs. The combination of large olfactory bulbs, high mitral cell counts and a greatly enlarged nasal cavity likely reflects a highly sensitive olfactory system. We suggest that this sensitive sense of smell allowed the turkey vulture to colonize biomes that are suboptimal for scavenging birds and become the most widespread vulture species in the world.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".