The exploitation of biofilm by migrant western sandpipers (Calidris mauri)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Assessing the quality of migratory shorebird stopover sites requires good measures of food availability. We developed simple methods to measure biofilm grazing by migrant western sandpipers ( Calidris mauri ), a species for which biofilm is an important dietary component. We used a field-portable chlorofluorometer to measure the density of chlorophyll- a (Chl- a ) in surficial biofilms on Roberts Bank, a large intertidal mudflat in British Columbia, Canada, during northward migration. Chl- a density begins at a low level during each diurnal emersion period, and increases steadily during emersion at 4.1 mg m −2 h −1 for a total of ∼24.6 mg m −2 over a typical 6 h emersion period and ∼41 mg m −2 over a 10 h emersion period. Western sandpipers grazed at 1.35–1.45 mg Chl- a m −2 min −1 , thus biofilm production supports 17.6 min m −2 of grazing time during a 6 h low tide period and 29.3 min m −2 during a 10 h period. During peak northward migration, the average grazing intensity of western sandpipers over an intertidal emersion period was 3.3–6.4 min m −2 , suggesting that biofilm accumulation was 2.7–8.8 fold greater than the amount consumed. We found Chl- a density was highest (∼65 mg per m 2 ) within 40 m of the shoreline. Grazing intensity was lowest close to shore, where predation risk from falcon attacks is highest. Grazing intensity peaked at 240 m and then declined, lowering Chl- a density at greater distances to a uniform level of ∼54 mg m −2 . These results indicate that interactions between biofilm production and sandpiper grazing underlie spatio-temporal patterns in biofilm abundance on Roberts Bank.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
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".