Under cover of darkness: Refuge from artificial light at night may mitigate risks to stranded seabirds
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Artificial light at night is an anthropogenic pollutant that has wide-ranging effects on wildlife. Fledgling seabirds of order Procellariiformes exhibit phototaxis toward artificial lights on their first flights from the nest, causing them to become grounded in human settlements, where they are subject to increased predation risk. Limited evidence suggests certain light types may be less attractive than others, yet there is also evidence for an aversion to light under certain circumstances. We investigated differences in phototactic behaviour, activity level, and shelter-seeking behaviour of grounded Hydrobates leucorhous (Leach’s storm-petrel) fledglings exposed to artificial light in three experiments: a Y-maze choice experiment, an open field test, and a modified open field test with a hide box provided (“Safe Haven test”). When provided with combinations of different light types in the Y-maze, storm-petrels typically remained stationary in the darkest parts of the apparatus (farthest from light stimuli) and exhibited no preferred response toward one light type over another. This was consistent with results from the open field test: individuals were less active in darkness than when exposed to two of three light conditions (Warm White Light-Emitting Diode and High Pressure Sodium). More than half of individuals entered the hide box in light conditions, compared to none in darkness. Considered together, our results indicate that most (but not all) Leach’s storm-petrel fledglings exhibit photophobic behaviour after stranding, which may be part of a behavioural strategy to avoid predation. Further, we demonstrate the utility of providing hide boxes to protect stranded seabird fledglings in locations where lighting cannot be eliminated or where rescue efforts are limited in spatial or temporal coverage. However, hide boxes would have limited utility in dark locations. Hide boxes constitute a novel mitigation measure that merits future testing for its ability to reduce stranding-induced mortality, especially in imperiled procellariiform species.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 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) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
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.
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".