Integrative approaches to evaluate challenges faced by songbirds during migration and associated physiological trade-offs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Migration is a demanding time for birds, and birds face numerous physiological, behavioral, and environmental challenges. As migratory birds balance the costs of numerous stressors during migration, this could result in detrimental physiological trade-offs. Understanding the trials and trade-offs that birds encounter during migration has important conservation implications. I utilized two component studies to better understand challenges encountered by migratory songbirds as well as to identify physiological metrics that may provide insight into these challenges. For the first study, I used nested PCR and DNA sequencing to determine parasite prevalence and diversity of avian haemosporidians in Canada Warblers (Cardellina canadensis) and Black-throated Blue Warblers (Setophaga caerulescens). I further evaluated if haemosporidian infections were related to immune condition, as assessed via total white blood cell (WBC) counts and heterophil/lymphocyte (H/L) ratios, or refueling patterns and/or migration timing. There was a high haemosporidian prevalence in sampled birds (51.5%). However, although haemosporidians appear to be a routine challenge faced by birds during migration, the analyses provided no evidence that Canada Warblers and Black-throated Blue Warblers experience physiological or behavioral trade-offs as a result of infections. In the second study, I used an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) developed for migratory birds to measure heat shock protein 60 (HSP60) in three species of Catharus thrushes during spring and fall migration. HSP60 was significantly higher during spring migration relative to fall migration, and there was moderate variation in HSP60 across species. HSP60 was not strongly associated with white blood cell counts, scaled mass index, plasma uric acid, or migration arrival date. Results suggest that HSP60 could exhibit correlations with numerous stressors associated with the challenges of long-distance migratory flight and that HSP60 is a robust metric of physiological stress suitable for avian migration studies.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".