Disease-driven mass mortality event leads to widespread extirpation and variable recovery potential of a marine predator across the eastern Pacific
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The prevalence of disease-driven mass mortality events is increasing, but our understanding of spatial variation in their magnitude, timing, and triggers are often poorly resolved. Here, we use a novel range-wide dataset comprised of 48,810 surveys to quantify how Sea Star Wasting Disease affected Pycnopodia helianthoides, the sunflower sea star, across its range from Baja California, Mexico to the Aleutian Islands, USA. We found that the outbreak occurred more rapidly, killed a greater percentage of the population, and left fewer survivors in the southern half of the species’ range. Pycnopodia now appears to be functionally extinct (> 99.2% declines) from Baja California, Mexico to Cape Flattery, Washington, USA and exhibited severe declines (> 87.8%) from the Salish Sea to the Gulf of Alaska. The importance of temperature in predicting Pycnopodia distribution rose 450% after the outbreak, suggesting these latitudinal gradients may stem from an interaction between disease severity and warmer waters. We found no evidence of population recovery in the years since the outbreak. Natural recovery in the southern half of the range is unlikely over the short-term and assisted recovery will likely be required for recovery in the southern half of the range on ecologically-relevant time scales.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.002 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".