Marbled Murrelet <i>Brachyramphus marmoratus</i> Use of a Freshwater Lake on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, 2018–2023
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Marbled Murrelets Brachyramphus marmoratus are small seabirds widely distributed in nearshore waters on the west coast of North America, from Alaska to central California. A 1986 review of anecdotal records revealed that Marbled Murrelets use coastal freshwater lakes during the breeding season, possibly to forage, and in winter, possibly while prospecting for nest sites in old-growth forest. Our weekly surveys and observations on Sproat Lake (central Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada) from November 2018 to March 2023, confirmed year round use by murrelets, with absences during the prealternate molt (beginning mid-March) and the prebasic molt (August and September), when the birds were probably at sea. Putative pairs predominated in all months, which suggests mated adults; single murrelets were recorded infrequently when pairs would have been separated during incubation. Murrelets were not observed holding prey, and fledglings were not recorded on the lake. The emerging importance of freshwater lakes and their watersheds as an aspect of Marbled Murrelet life history requires further research, particularly in light of this species’ possible sensitivity to human recreational and other disturbances when using lakes. Identification of recurring use of freshwater lakes, such as Sproat Lake, by Marbled Murrelets could inform conservation actions directed toward potential nesting habitat in nearby old-growth forests.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.093 | 0.003 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".