Changes in plastic ingestion over the breeding season: do yellow-legged gulls (Larus michahellis) adjust foraging habits for chick provisioning?
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
Abstract: Over the last few decades, anthropogenic debris, and particularly plastics, have become a major threat for the environment and biodiversity. Over 200 seabird species have been recorded to interact directly with plastics, leading to reductions in survival and/or breeding rates, and consequently representing a major conservation concern. Breeding birds are known to adjust prey quality over the breeding season in order to provide higher quality food for chick provisioning. Nevertheless, it is unclear what this means with respect to the use of anthropogenic food sources used by seabirds. Over the 2020 breeding season, regurgitated pellets, or boluses (n=143), from yellow-legged gulls (Larus michahellis) were collected from a series of nests at Carteau colony in the Gulf of Fos, Camargue, France. 85% (n=121) contained at least one plastic. The most abundant plastic type was sheet plastic, mainly composed of polyethylene and used in food packagings. There was a significant decrease in the number of boluses containing plastics between pre-hatching and post hatching (respectively 84% and 75%). The number of collected boluses also declined between these two periods (respectively n=82 and n=61). These results suggest that gulls may indeed adjust their foraging habits to provide more digestible food to chicks. However, we found high variability among the followed nests in the number of recovered boluses, and a large majority of regurgitates still contained anthropogenic items post-hatching. As yellow-legged gulls are known to specialize on particular food sources, landfill specialist birds may continue to use these food items during chick rearing despite their potential risk for chick growth and survival. More detailed surveys will now be required to test whether these birds are nonetheless able to select different types of anthropogenic items to maximize reproductive success. Authors: Florence Droguet¹, Carole Leray², Alexandra ter Halle³, Marion Vittecoq², Jennifer Provencher⁴, Karen McCoy¹ ¹University of Montpellier CNRS IRD, Centre IRD, ²Tour du Valat, Research Institute for the Conservation of Mediterranean Wetlands, ³UMR 5623 CNRS - University of Toulouse III Paul Sabatier, ⁴Environment and Climate Change Canada, National Wildlife Research Centre
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.
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 | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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