PLUMAGE VARIATION IN BERING SEA PLECTROPHENAX BUNTINGS AND THE SPECIFIC STATUS OF McKAY’S BUNTING
Bibliographic record
Abstract
McKay’s Bunting (Plectrophenax hyperboreus) is an enigmatic and little studied passerine that breeds only on one of the most isolated groups of islands in North America. Recent fild work on those islands, St. Matthew and Hall, and the nearby Pribilof Islands produced specimens of breeding McKay’s and Snow Buntings (P. nivalis) demonstrating that plumage variation in both taxa is signifiant, probably not related to age aftr the fist year, and varies continuously between the extremes within a taxon. Th extreme of one closely approaches that of the other. McKay’s Buntings are paler overall and levels of black pigmentation of the wings, back, and tail, in conjunction with sex, allow qualitative diagnosability of these taxaby plumage in nearly 100% of individuals if enough of the bird can be seen. Levels of plumage variation are congruent with recent genomic work suggesting their relationship is extremely close. Current information suggests that McKay’s Bunting is not a biological species and should be considered a subspecies of the Snow Bunting
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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) | 0.000 | 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".