Halos of herbivory, feeding-preference, and predation risk on contemporary Belizean reefs
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Biotic interactions in marine ecosystems can create visible patterns on the benthos. An archetypal example of such a pattern is the conspicuous ‘halos’ (i.e., areas largely cleared of macrophytes) that surround many tropical reefs. While early ecological studies identified the role of herbivores and the predators that feed on them in the formation of halos on Caribbean reefs, recent evidence has highlighted the context-dependent nature of these biotic interactions. Widespread ecosystem changes and associated alterations in food webs suggest potential changes in the context for Caribbean reefs since those early studies. However, the extent to which different herbivores and predators contribute to halo formation and/or maintenance on contemporary Caribbean reefs remains unclear. We quantified herbivory on five macrophyte species across adjacent reef, halo, and seagrass zones, in a manner that allowed us to partially partition herbivory between sea urchins and fishes. Furthermore, we directly tethered the urchin Diadema antillarum on reefs and in halos to quantify predation risk for this key herbivore. The removal of macrophyte assays was high on coral reefs and in halos when compared to seagrass beds, with macrophyte selection by herbivores conserved across zones. Fishes, rather than urchins, were the major herbivores in halos. Moreover, we documented higher predation on urchins in halos compared to reefs, revealing that predation may still shape diurnal urchin distribution in exposed habitats. Despite substantial ecological changes on Caribbean reefs since early studies, halo formation/maintenance by selective fish feeding activity is an enduring feature in the functioning of contemporary Belizean seascapes.
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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 it