Does organ and muscle plasticity vary by habitat or age in wintering Lesser Snow Geese Anser caerulescens caerulescens?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Plasticity in organ and muscle size and function allows individuals to respond to changes in food quality or foraging behaviour, in accordance with cost-benefit hypotheses. Lesser Snow Geese Anser caerulescens caerulescens (hereafter Snow Geese) winter in rice-prairie and coastal-marsh habitats in southwest Louisiana, where the time that the birds spend foraging and walking, their composite diets, and associated fibre and energy contents, differ between these two habitats. We therefore hypothesised that: 1) Snow Geese that feed primarily in coastal marshes during winter would have larger digestive organs than those in rice-prairies, to adapt to the higher fibre content of their marsh vegetation diet; and 2) that leg muscles of Snow Geese feeding in rice-prairies would undergo greater hypertrophy and thus be larger than those in coastal marshes, because individuals in rice-prairie habitat spend more time walking while foraging. The first hypothesis applied to adults and juveniles alike, whereas under the second hypothesis, we knew from concurrent studies that juveniles walk more than adults and therefore predicted that they would have relatively larger leg muscles, after adjusting for body size. Seventy juvenile and 40 adult Snow Geese were dissected to test these two hypotheses about plasticity and hypertrophy with respect to habitat and foraging behaviour. Caeca and gizzard lengths were found to be larger for Snow Geese feeding in coastal marshes, where the food ingested is relatively high in fibre compared with the birds’ diet in the rice-prairies. Conversely, leg muscles were larger for Snow Geese foraging in rice-prairies, where the juvenile geese spend relatively more time walking. Although not fully grown, juvenile Snow Geese also varied in the length of their digestive system and hypertrophy in muscles in relation to habitat, reinforcing the view that the birds’ morphology adapts to different feeding habitats and diets.
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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 | 0.000 | 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) | 0.001 | 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 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".