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Record W4416719877 · doi:10.1093/iob/obaf045

Oil Droplet Capture by Tunicates

2025· article· en· W4416719877 on OpenAlex
Katherine Beaudry, Christopher B. Cameron

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.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.

Bibliographic record

VenueIntegrative Organismal Biology · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEnvironmental Science
TopicOil Spill Detection and Mitigation
Canadian institutionsUniversité de Montréal
FundersNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
KeywordsOil dropletBenthic zonePelagic zoneWaste oilPetroleumSeawaterInvertebrate

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Synopsis Species of filter-feeding invertebrates are exposed to natural oil droplets or petroleum oil droplets in water, and many species feed on these droplets. Here, we investigate oil droplet capture by benthic tunicates. We used videography, dissections, and tetramethylrhodamine isothiocyanate (TRITC) fluorescence microscopy to study the capture of oil droplets by 10 different species of tunicate. Eight of nine species fed on waste motor oil demonstrating that it is a general phenomenon. The exception was Clavelina huntsmani. Corella willmeriana fed on light crude oil based on evidence of droplets in the branchial basket, gut, and feces. These results demonstrate that tunicates can provide an entry for oils into marine food webs. A further experiment found that Styela gibbsii fed on emulsions of fish, canola, marine 10W-30, semi-synthetic 2-cycle, and waste 5W-20 oil in filtered seawater and unfiltered seawater. It showed no selectivity despite differences in chemistry, density, viscosity, and interfacial tensions. Finally, the size distribution of oil droplets captured by S. gibbsii and Ciona intestinalis were compared to the feeding trial emulsions and found to be significantly narrower, and on the smaller end of the range. This study provides some general insights into oil droplet capture by tunicates, the mechanics of droplet capture, the absence of selection based on the type of oil, and oil droplet size capture. Tunicates are some of the most ubiquitous and abundant animals in the world’s oceans and the pelagic species significantly alter global carbon cycles. Here, we show that benthic species, common on docks and wharves, ingest natural occurring and engine oils, offering a new puzzle piece in our knowledge on the bioaccumulation and trophic transfer of oils in marine food networks.

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.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Bench or experimental · Consensus signal: Bench or experimental
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.405
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0040.001

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 head0.003
GPT teacher head0.225
Teacher spread0.222 · 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