Predator effects link ecological communities: kelp created by sea otters provides an unexpected subsidy to bald eagles
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Ecological communities are best studied at the landscape level, where linkages among communities are considered. Such linkages are often driven by increases in primary production caused by apex predators limiting herbivores. In this note, we describe a novel linkage among sea otters ( Enhydra lutris ), the long‐lived woody kelp ( Pterygophora californica ), and bald eagles ( Haliaeetus leucocephalus ). While counting sea otters in an isolated group of rocky islets on the Central Coast of British Columbia, we found an eagle nest composed of mostly Pterygophora stalks. Pterygophora recruits rapidly after sea otters arrive in an area and limit sea urchins; the subsequent pulsed Pterygophora recruitment results in narrow age‐class cohorts that senesce en masse after about 20 yr. When the woody stipes wash ashore, they degrade slowly and persist as beach wrack for years. These windrows of woody kelp are common on the BC coast where sea otters have re‐established. We demonstrate how this subsidy can be used by bald eagles, and predict that as sea otters recover across their range in BC , further effects of Pterygophora to intertidal, supralittoral, and terrestrial communities will be observed.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 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".