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Record W4410524104 · doi:10.1101/2025.05.15.654001

Using wingbeat frequency to estimate mass gained by seabirds

2025· preprint· en· W4410524104 on OpenAlexafffund
Allison Patterson, Marie Auger‐Méthé, Kyle H. Elliott

Bibliographic record

VenuebioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) · 2025
Typepreprint
Languageen
FieldEnvironmental Science
TopicAvian ecology and behavior
Canadian institutionsMcGill UniversityUniversity of British ColumbiaFisheries and Oceans CanadaEnvironment and Climate Change Canada
FundersNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of CanadaEnvironment and Climate Change CanadaBird Studies Canada
KeywordsEnvironmental scienceGeographyAeronauticsFisheryBiologyEngineering

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract 1. Energy intake is a fundamental currency in ecology that is critical to reproductive success, survival and lifetime fitness. Measuring foraging success in wild animals via biologgers has been a long-standing challenge. 2. Flying animals gain mass during foraging, and they must counteract the associated increased gravitational force by creating additional lift. Pennycuick (1996) proposed that wingbeat frequency ( w ) should vary with the square root of body mass , when other variables influencing wingbeat frequency are held constant. 3. We present a state-space model that estimates instantaneous changes in body mass by modelling this relationship with wingbeat frequency using animal-borne accelerometer and depth data. To demonstrate the usefulness of our proposed method, we applied it to biologging data from 55 thick-billed murres ( Uria lomvia ) during the incubation period. 4. Our mass estimates allowed us to identify areas associated with higher gains, and to demonstrate that foraging success was generally higher farther from the colony. However, 79% of foraging trips were associated with mass deficits. We performed simulation studies to assess the sensitivity of our method to parameter misspecification and the increase in accuracy gained from including the known mass at recapture. As estimates of energy intake allow for testing of long-standing hypotheses in foraging ecology, our method provides a new tool to help answer these questions with any animal that engages in flapping flight.

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 machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.002
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.004
Threshold uncertainty score0.009

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.002
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0020.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.016
GPT teacher head0.261
Teacher spread0.245 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations1
Published2025
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venuebioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)→Same topicAvian ecology and behavior→French-language works237,207→