The Great Auk (<i>Pinguinus impennis</i>) had two brood patches, not one: confirmation and implications
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since the late 1600s it has been assumed that the Great AukPinguinus impenniswas similar to the Common GuillemotUria aalgeand Brünnich's GuillemotUria lomviain having a single, central brood patch. Through the examination of eight mounted museum specimens, we show that this is incorrect and that, like its closest relative the RazorbillAlca torda, the Great Auk had two lateral brood patches. We discuss how such misinformation persisted for so long. We also review the relationship between the number of brood patches and clutch size in the Alcidae. One implication of two brood patches is that the Great Auk would have incubated in a horizontal posture like the Razorbill, rather than in a semi‐upright posture like theUriaguillemots. Assuming that the Great Auk incubated like the Razorbill, it would probably have done so horizontally with its single egg pressed against one of the two lateral brood patches, positioned against the inside of one tarsus (and partially on the web of one foot), and with the wing on that side drooped to provide additional protection for the egg. Incubating in this way may have meant that the Great Auk's pyriform egg would have enabled it to use both level and sloping terrain, as in theUriaguillemots (but unlike the Razorbill). A horizontal incubation also has implications for estimates of their breeding density, which we estimate to have been around four pairs per square metre and, hence numbers on its largest known colony, Funk Island, Newfoundland (maximum 250 000 pairs).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".