Leaping Red Foxes Cause Chronic Mortality of Adult Leach's Storm-Petrels Transiting Over Land
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Hydrobates leucorhous (Leach's Storm-Petrel) is a small seabird that has undergone significant population declines across its North Atlantic breeding range. Threat assessments have identified predation as an important contributing factor, with most predation studies describing significant mortalities at colonies or when recently fledged Leach's Storm-Petrels strand on land during their maiden voyage in the fall. Through a combination of nighttime observations and weekly systematic searches for wings from June to October in 2022 and 2023, we documented chronic mortality of Leach's Storm-Petrels transiting over Southern Bill, the most eastern point of land at Cape Freels, in northeastern Newfoundland and Labrador (NL), Canada. We observed Vulpes vulpes (Red Fox) leaping into the air to predate on flying birds and estimated this predatory behavior to kill a minimum of 320–850 individuals each year, with nightly mortality rates highest in June and lowest in September and October and impacting only adult birds. Long-lived species with a delayed breeding strategy, such as Leach's Storm-Petrels, are inherently resilient to juvenile mortality, but are sensitive to small increases in adult mortality leading to population declines. Considering recent population declines, regular monitoring of major Leach's Storm-Petrel colonies on NL's northeast coast should be prioritized, as should surveying islands that are known to host Leach's Storm-Petrels but have not been formally censused.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 |
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".