Ecomorphological adaptations of owl feet and talons
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Feet and talons are the most specialized predatory attributes of raptor morphology. As such, the hindlimb morphology of owls should reflect their dietary specialization. Owls' diet varies widely between species with only a subset of owl species preying predominantly on small mammals. We hypothesize that different owl species have varied hindlimb morphology, adapted to their main prey types, and that only dietary specialists will be distinguishable based on talon morphology (e.g. toe length, talon curvature and thickness, etc.). We used a sample of 63 specimens from 15 owl species to obtain a variety of measurements of hindlimb morphology. We then used a discriminant function analysis to investigate the degree of variation between species and diet groups in terms of their morphological measurements. Our results indicate that talon morphology is linked to prey type in the owl species studied. Insect specialists and small mammal specialists were characterized by a low talon curvature, whereas generalists presented a pronounced talon curvature. Fish specialists presented particularly thick and robust talons, and insect specialists showed lower digit strength than other owl species. These findings could help determine the diet of other owl species, particularly endangered species for which data on diet is often scarce. This study will also be very useful in future studies of the ecology of sympatric species, resource partitioning between species, or between sexes of the same species, and more generally to the evolution of owls.
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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) | 0.000 | 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".