First record of synthetic micro-fibre ingestion by Mute Swans Cygnus olor and Whooper Swans C. cygnus
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite an acute focus on the ingestion of large and small synthetic debris by seabirds, scant consideration has been given to their occurrence in other avian species inhabiting coastal and inland wetland areas. Here, we assess ingestion of synthetic micro-fibres (i.e. microplastics and other non-natural fibres, 0.5-5 mm in size) by Mute Swans Cygnus olor inhabiting a large freshwater reservoir (n = 12 faecal samples), and from Whooper Swans C. cygnus wintering on a remote offshore Atlantic island (n = 11 faecal samples). Samples were chemically digested to eliminate labile organic matter including natural fibres. In total, 79 synthetic micro-fibres were recovered at frequencies of 4.2 ± 0.8 and 2.6 ± 0.7 (mean ± s.e.) per sample, ranging from 0-10 and 0-7 micro-fibres per sample, for Mute Swan and Whooper Swan faecal samples, respectively. The number of synthetic micro-fibres recovered did not differ significantly between species or sites. Similarly, there was no difference in the number of synthetic micro-fibres detected per gram of faecal sample. Overall, our preliminary data further bolster emerging records for the ingestion of synthetic debris by non-marine waterbirds inhabiting freshwater and coastal areas.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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) | 0.002 | 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".