Investigating Plastic Pollution Ingestion in Migratory Turkey Vultures (Cathartes aura) in Ontario, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Turkey Vultures (Cathartes aura) are opportunistic scavengers that provide essential ecosystem services, yet their populations face multiple, potentially synergistic health threats. The potential health implications of chronic plastic pollution ingestion in birds are of increasing concern, yet rates of plastic ingestion are poorly understood for Turkey Vultures across their range. We investigated plastic ingestion by migratory Turkey Vultures in Ontario, Canada. We collected regurgitated pellets at communal roost sites to serve as noninvasive proxies for plastic ingestion. A total of four communal roosts were sampled, with two of these sites sampled across multiple years (2021–2023). Plastics and other anthropogenic debris were detected in 16.3% of pellets (range: 4.0–34.6% across sites and years). This is the first reported detection of plastic ingestion by migratory Turkey Vultures in the northern part of their range. Our results provide baseline data for the assessment of plastic ingestion in this species and contribute novel data about plastic pollution in an understudied terrestrial environment.
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 | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| 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".