Growth and maturation of rainbow smelt (<i>Osmerus mordax</i>) at the northern limit of their distribution range (Lake Melville, Labrador): Support for the hypothesized temperature-size rule
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Rainbow smelt (Osmerus mordax), a small pelagic fish found throughout the northwest Atlantic Ocean, experienced a northward retreat of its distribution range over the 20th century and an overall decline in biomass in recent decades, both attributed to warming waters and habitat loss. In the Lake Melville estuary (Labrador, Canada), at the northern limit of its distribution range, smelt represents the main forage species and faces environmental changes from both climate warming and hydroelectric dams. This study aims to improve our understanding of the ecology of rainbow smelt and its vulnerability to climate and anthropogenic changes. We investigated hatching period, growth, and maturation of rainbow smelt in the Lake Melville estuary using trawl surveys and otolithometry. Growth and maturity from rainbow smelt in Lake Melville were then compared to southern populations to test the temperature-size rule, which stipulates slower growth and larger length-at-age of maturity at colder temperatures. In accordance with this rule, adult rainbow smelt in Lake Melville grew slower, matured up to 2 years later, and lived up to 3 years longer compared to southern populations. In contrast to it, larval growth rate was up to 3 times faster than values reported for a more southern population. Our results demonstrate that rainbow smelt in Lake Melville are well adapted to the short growth season and cold water temperatures prevailing at sub-arctic latitudes. Yet, if variation in life history across their range is a plastic response to thermal gradients, populations at their northern limits could benefit from a longer and warmer growth season.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".