Short-term dietary changes are reflected in the cerebral content of adult Ring-billed Gulls
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Long-chain omega-3s (n3-LCPUFAs) are produced primarily in aquatic ecosystems and are essential for the structural integrity of vertebrates' brains. Carnivorous mammals must consume n3-LCPUFAs throughout their lifespan to maintain optimal cerebral functions; it is unknown whether other taxa are under similar nutritional pressures. This is concerning because many avian predators now rely on anthropogenic foods lacking n3-LCPUFAs. Here, we tested whether a recent or longer-term diet explains the encephalic fatty acid composition of a seabird, the Ring-billed Gull, that now thrives in cities. During the breeding season, rural gulls exploiting marine organisms had significantly higher encephalic levels of n3-LCPUFAs (mean±SD: 32±1%) than city-nesting gulls exploiting garbage (27±1%). Stable isotope analysis of blood and feathers grown during different seasons showed that urban and rural nesters consumed similar fall and winter diets, suggesting that the difference in cerebral n3-LCPUFA of breeding adults was due to concomitant and transient dietary differences. We also experimentally manipulated gulls' diets throughout incubation with a n3-LCPUFA supplement, a n3-LCPUFA-free caloric equivalent, or nothing, and found evidence that supplemental n3-LCPUFA increased urban nesters' cerebral levels of n3-LCPUFAs. These complementary analyses provide strong evidence that the brain of a seabird remains plastic during adulthood and responsive to short-term dietary changes.
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.
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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".