Sea-ice perturbation and mass starvation of Thick-billed Murres in the Northwest Atlantic Ocean
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Mass mortality among seabirds has been associated with ocean heatwaves. Though less commonly reported, cold water events can also be devastating. During spring 2022, thousands of Thick-billed Murres ( Uria lomvia Linnaeus 1758) died on the southern Labrador and northeastern Newfoundland coasts. We describe the extent of mortality, its timing, spatial extent, and associated ocean-climate conditions. We diagnose mortality and compare carcasses to healthy birds. The rapid-onset, 5-week event lasted from 18 March to 25 April 2022, emanating from an impact site in southern Labrador. Extreme winds compacted and reduced sea ice area, which exposed sub-zero water temperatures and limited feeding options. Neither sex nor age were associated with mortality, and a subset of carcasses tested negative for influenza A. Carcass masses averaged 65.5% of the body mass of healthy birds, indicative of a threshold for stage III starvation (protein catabolism). Photographs and measurements showed significant pectoral muscle wasting, and pectoral mass was less than that of healthy birds. The probable cause of the die-off is starvation accelerated by a rapid drop in water temperature and limited foraging options driven by a sea-ice perturbation. Ocean-climatic variability and extreme events are expected to increase, posing challenges for polar seabirds.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".