Feather corticosterone reveals developmental challenges in a long‐term study of juvenile northern spotted owls
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Corticosterone is a steroid hormone integral to a variety of physiological pathways and is strongly associated with the vertebrate stress response. In avian species, circulating corticosterone is sequestered into developing feathers and is used as an indicator of energy allocation during feather growth and widely applied in conservation physiology. The northern spotted owl Strix occidentalis caurina is a federally threatened old‐growth forest obligate of conservation concern endemic to the Pacific Northwest of the United States and Canada. The effects of landscape characteristics and individual variation on early development in spotted owls remain unstudied despite long recognition of this knowledge gap and its potential importance to species conservation. We quantified corticosterone concentrations in 4,720 feathers from 1,056 juvenile spotted owls across seven study areas between 2001 and 2017. We used an information‐theoretic approach to examine the environmental and individual factors related to feather corticosterone in juvenile spotted owls as an indicator of challenges during early development. Feather corticosterone was positively related to temperature and precipitation, and negatively related to juvenile mass at banding. We found strong support for an interaction between mass and precipitation, with greater amounts of precipitation being associated with higher levels of feather corticosterone in lighter juveniles. The temperature and precipitation metric with the strongest relationship with feather corticosterone occurred during the fledging period, suggesting that this period presents an energetic challenge for juvenile spotted owls. Greater juvenile mass decreased the effect of precipitation, suggesting that greater mass was important for juveniles to maintain homeostasis during fledgling. Feather corticosterone in juvenile spotted owls provided insights to the challenges faced during early development, adding to our understanding of spotted owl life history and potential for population recovery. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.001 | 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 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".