Vagrant harlequin ducks feed on a buffet of blennies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Typically found in eastern Russia, northern North America, Greenland, and Iceland, harlequin ducks (Histrionicus histrionicus) breed near whitewater rivers and spend the winter on rocky coastlines, where they feed on invertebrates and small fishes (Ecology 1986; doi.org/10.2307/1939078). Despite their temperate and subarctic distribution, two vagrant female harlequin ducks were observed in the Corpus Christi Ship Channel near the Port Aransas Jetty (Port Aransas, TX) in February 2022, representing only the third known confirmation of the species in Texas. The ducks remained in the channel for several days and were observed feeding on Molly Miller blennies (Scartella cristata), a common cryptobenthic fish with a wide distribution along tropical and subtropical coastlines. The dredged shipping channel connects the Gulf of Mexico to a ~380-km-long estuarine system and directly flows into the Mission-Aransas Estuary, a highly productive marine environment important for commercial fishing and wintering diving waterbirds. During the winter, harlequin ducks forage along rocky intertidal zones with wave exposure (Estuar Coast Shelf S 2019; doi.org/10.1016/j.ecss.2019.04.024). Thus, the rock piles and strong tides in the shipping channel may have provided the ducks’ only suitable feeding habitat in a system dominated by soft sediments and limited water movement. With their exceptional diving abilities in harsh environments, the sea ducks had access to an ample buffet of blennies, which were evidently unprepared for this skilled predator. Although these hardy ducks exhibit high site fidelity and are of low conservation concern globally, they face habitat loss and population declines in eastern North America. Vagrants are often accidentals, but the harlequin ducks’ journey may have been intentional (Biol Conserv 2018; doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2018.06.006); disturbances to their wintering habitat in Maine or eastern Canada could drive bold individuals to search for alternative feeding grounds. Will habitat loss incur novel trophic interactions, particularly involving migratory birds?
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 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) | 0.006 | 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 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".