Egg Size, Eggshell Porosity, and Incubation Period in the Marine Bird Family Alcidae
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Although the ultimate factors that influence the duration of avian incubation periods are well known, we know much less about the proximate mechanisms by which birds adjust incubation period in response to selection. We tested the hypothesis that an adjustment in eggshell porosity is one such proximate mechanism (i.e., that avian species with higher ratios of incubation period to egg size lay eggs with less porous shells). Eggshell porosity affects the rate of gaseous exchange between the developing embryo and the external environment; thus, to the extent that embryonic metabolism is diffusion-limited, eggshell porosity could directly determine incubation period. To test that hypothesis, we collected eggs from seven species of Alcidae, a family of marine birds that exhibits an unusual degree of interspecific variation in incubation period, and measured egg mass and eggshell porosity (determined by the number and size of pores and the thickness of the shell). Incubation periods were obtained from the literature. Egg mass and eggshell porosity combined explained 87% of the variation in incubation period among the seven species, which included at least one member of each of the six main alcid lineages. As predicted, eggshell porosity and incubation period were negatively related, after controlling for egg mass. Our results are consistent with the hypothesis that evolutionary changes in avian incubation period may be attributed, at least in part, to adjustments in eggshell porosity. Taille de l’Œuf, Porosité de la Coquille et Période d’Incubation chez les Oiseaux Marins de la Famille des Alcidés
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| 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 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".