Positive relationship between coastal phytoplankton abundance and intertidal barnacle growth along the Nova Scotia coast
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Benthicâpelagic coupling refers to the ecological relationships between benthic and pelagic environments. Studying such links is particularly useful to understand biological variation in intertidal organisms along marine coasts. Filter-feeding invertebrates are important on marine rocky shores, so they have often been used to investigate benthicâpelagic coupling. Most studies, however, were done on eastern ocean boundary coasts highly influenced by upwelling. To evaluate the extent of benthicâpelagic coupling on a western ocean boundary coast, we conducted a 5-year study spanning 415 km of the Atlantic coast of Nova Scotia (Canada). Between 2014 and 2018, we annually measured intertidal barnacle growth in experimental clearings created on the rocky substrate at eight wave-exposed locations. We then examined the relationships with chlorophyll-a concentration (Chl-a), a commonly used proxy for the abundance of phytoplankton (food for barnacle nauplius larvae and benthic stages). For every year and location, we used satellite data to calculate Chl-a averages for a period ranging from the early spring (when likely most larvae were in the water) to the summer (when barnacle size was measured after weeks of growth following spring benthic recruitment). The relationships were always positive, Chl-a explaining nearly half, or more, of the variation in barnacle size in four of the five studied years. These are remarkable results because they were based on a relatively limited number of locations (which often curtails statistical power) and point to the relevance of pelagic food supply to explain variation in barnacle growth along this western ocean boundary coast.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.040 | 0.330 |
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".