What northern pike (Esox lucius) stomach contents reveal about post-management community dynamics in Lac La Biche, Alberta
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Predator density within freshwater lakes is often manipulated to restore commercially important species; however, such management may inadvertently result in dietary shifts of existing predator populations. The 2005 Fisheries Restoration Program in Lac La Biche, Alberta, was established to recover walleye (Sander vitreus) populations through both bird culls and intensive stocking. Although walleye abundance increased dramatically, other dominant piscivores' responses to management actions, namely the Northern pike (Esox lucius), were less clear. To avoid high interspecific competition for prey fish, pike may shift their diets to incorporate a greater abundance of invertebrates. However, the overall importance of invertivory is community-dependent and remains understudied. To elucidate how pike feeding and community interactions have changed in response to management in Lac La Biche, a stomach content analysis was performed on 121 pike stomachs sampled during Fall Walleye Index Netting Surveys between 2009 and 2013. Piscivory was the most common feeding style (34.1% ±4.7% SE), with yellow perch (Perca flavescens) and coregonids the most common prey. Invertivory and mixed-feeding remained relatively uncommon and stable (4.6% ±2.1% SE and 16.3% ±2.6% SE, respectively). Although invertebrates represent a valuable supplement, pure invertivory as a specialization remains uncommon in this population during the sampled years. Department: Biology Faculty Mentors: Dr. David Locky and Dr. Mrinal Das
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".