Intraspecific variation in feeding mechanics and bite force in durophagous stingrays
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Animal performance is tightly linked to morphological function, whereby changes in size and performance can influence niche dynamics over ontogeny. To understand how growth affects feeding performance, we examined how bite force over ontogeny differed between two populations of durophagous stingrays, Rhinoptera bonasus (from the Chesapeake Bay and the Florida Gulf Coast, USA ). Cownose stingrays from the Chesapeake Bay specialize on mollusks, whereas Gulf of Mexico stingrays are omnivorous, feeding on a variety of benthic invertebrates. Increases in jaw adductor size resulted in positive bite force allometry across ontogeny in both stingray populations. However, scaling patterns between muscle units differed between the populations, with more drastic increases in bite force over ontogeny in populations feeding on more robust prey. Mechanical testing of the fracture forces of prey suggests that juvenile bivalves are particularly vulnerable to predation by either stingray population. However, Gulf coast stingrays exhibit lower bite forces across ontogeny compared to Chesapeake rays. Chesapeake Bay rays are born larger, further exaggerating the performance disparity between these populations. Although these animals generate considerable bite forces, their ability to comminute bivalves at marketable sizes is doubtful.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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".