Minimal Accumulation of Microplastics in Shorebirds at Migratory Stopover Sites in Canada
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.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We quantified egested microplastics and identified plastic polymer composition for three shorebird species (Western Sandpiper Calidris mauri, Dunlin Calidris alpina, and Semipalmated Sandpiper Calidris pusilla) by collecting fecal samples at major stopover sites on the Pacific and Atlantic coasts of Canada in 2022. The sampling effort resulted in a total of 133 individual fecal samples, 93 from the Pacific sites and 40 from the Atlantic sites. Frequency of occurrence (FO) of microplastics was generally low and ranged by species: Western Sandpiper (FO = 13%, n = 11/87), Dunlin (FO = 17%, n = 1/6), and Semipalmated Sandpiper (FO = 3%, n = 1/40). We isolated a total of 14 plastic microfibers from 13 birds, of which polyester was the most common polymer (n = 6), followed by polypropylene (n = 4), and polyamide (n = 4). The colour of microplastics were white (n = 9, 64%) and black (n = 5, 36%), and the average length was 2.35 mm (SD = 1.18 mm). This study adds Western Sandpiper and Semipalmated Sandpiper to the list of shorebirds that are demonstrated to ingest microplastic pollution and underscores the need to understand the consequences of such ingestion.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 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) | 0.000 | 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 it