Synthesis of Maternal Transfer of Mercury in Birds: Implications for Altered Toxicity Risk
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Maternal transfer is a predominant route of methylmercury (MeHg) exposure to offspring. We reviewed and synthesized published and unpublished data on maternal transfer of MeHg in birds. Using paired samples of females’ blood (n = 564) and their eggs (n = 1814) from 26 bird species in 6 taxonomic orders, we conducted a meta-analysis to evaluate whether maternal transfer of MeHg to eggs differed among species and caused differential toxicity risk to embryos. Total mercury (THg) concentrations in eggs increased with maternal blood THg concentrations; however, the proportion of THg transferred from females to their eggs differed among bird taxa and with maternal THg exposure. Specifically, a smaller proportion of maternal THg was transferred to eggs with increasing female THg concentrations. Additionally, the proportion of THg that was transferred to eggs at the same maternal blood THg concentration differed among taxonomic orders, with waterfowl (Anseriformes) transferring up to 382% more THg into their eggs than songbirds (Passeriformes). We provide equations to predict THg concentrations in eggs using female blood THg concentrations, and vice versa, which may help translate toxicity benchmarks across tissues and life stages. Our results indicate that toxicity risk of MeHg can vary among bird taxa due to differences in maternal transfer of MeHg to offspring.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".