Establishing functionally important predators on crown-of-throwns starfish (Acanthaster spp.)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Population irruptions of crown-of-thorns starfish (CoTS; Acanthaster spp.) are one of the foremost causes of coral loss and reef degradation throughout the Indo west-Pacific. The seemingly recent and/or increasing frequency and severity of CoTS population irruptions is often attributed to declining abundance or function of putative predators. Accordingly, there has been extensive research on, and an ever-growing list of, potentially important predators on CoTS. The latest candidates are eagle rays (family Myliobatidae), which were observed feeding among coral rubble in shallow reef areas in Kanaky New Caledonia (see Kayal and Lenihan 2025). Assuming that these large benthic feeders can detect and consume juvenile CoTS, eagle rays could have the necessary feeding capacity to effectively regulate CoTS populations and/ or contribute to suppressing local CoTS densities. There is however, considerable research needed to establish the functional importance of eagle rays and other putative predators. Most critically, rates of predation and corresponding mortality need to be ascertained, both in areas where there are sustained lowdensities of CoTS and where there is high incidence and predictable recurrence of population irruptions.
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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 | 0.000 | 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".