Conspecific nest attendance behaviour of Common Eider (<i>Somateria mollissima</i>) in response to Polar Bear (<i>Ursus maritimus</i>) foraging activity: error or intent?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Common Eider (Somateria mollissima) is a colonial nesting sea duck with extremely high nest attendance rates. Although individuals take few recess breaks away from their nest to feed or preen, previous research has shown that some female eiders in dense nesting assemblages engage in conspecific nest attendance, spending short amounts of time incubating nests of other females. However, to the best of our knowledge, most observations of these behaviours occur during regular recess events, as opposed to instances where females flush from their nest in response to a foraging predator. Using drone videography on East Bay Island, northern Hudson Bay, Nunavut, Canada, we observed conspecific nest attendance behaviours in 11 eiders that flushed in response to a foraging Polar Bear (Ursus maritimus). Of the 11 birds attending to other nests, only two predation events were observed at the focal bird’s nest (i.e., two attenders’ own nests were predated). Of the nine nests that were attended to, we also only observed two predation events. Motivations behind these behaviours are unclear, but conspecific nest attendance may serve as a type of distraction display, whereby activity at another female’s nest leads the predator away from the focal bird’s nest. However, given that, on East Bay Island, eiders are known to nest in proximity to kin, distraction displays at nests of related individuals would incur fitness costs. General confusion on nest location or the concealment of closely related eggs are more likely explanations for these behaviours.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 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".