Zinc isotopes from archaeological bones provide reliable trophic level information for marine mammals
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In marine ecology, dietary interpretations of faunal assemblages often rely on nitrogen isotopes as the main or only applicable trophic level tracer. We investigate the geographic variability and trophic level isotopic discrimination factors of bone zinc 66 Zn/ 64 Zn ratios (δ 66 Zn value) and compared it to collagen nitrogen and carbon stable isotope (δ 15 N and δ 13 C) values. Focusing on ringed seals ( Pusa hispida ) and polar bears ( Ursus maritimus ) from multiple Arctic archaeological sites, we investigate trophic interactions between predator and prey over a broad geographic area. All proxies show variability among sites, influenced by the regional food web baselines. However, δ 66 Zn shows a significantly higher homogeneity among different sites. We observe a clear trophic spacing for δ 15 N and δ 66 Zn values in all locations, yet δ 66 Zn analysis allows a more direct dietary comparability between spatially and temporally distinct locations than what is possible by δ 15 N and δ 13 C analysis alone. When combining all three proxies, a more detailed and refined dietary analysis is possible.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
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".