Body Size, Nest Initiation Date, and Egg Production in Ruddy Ducks
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Female Ruddy Ducks (Oxyura jamaicensis) produce the largest eggs, relative to body size, of all waterfowl (Lack 1968).Energy in one of their eggs is equivalent to 322% of daily basal metabolic rate (A1isauskas and Ankney 1992), the highest of all Anatidae.Furthermore, Ruddy Ducks lay one egg per day (Siegfried 1976).Female Ruddy Ducks rely on both endogenous and exogenous nutrients for egg production.On average, 49% of the lipid, 41% of the protein, and 16% of the minerals required for egg production are supplied by stored reserves in Ruddy Ducks (Alisauskas and Ankney 1994).These authors also reported that the size of lipid, mineral, and protein reserves was positively related to body size in their sample of breeding females.Thus, we predicted that larger female Ruddy Ducks would lay larger clutches.Also, because birds in good condition (i.e. with larger reserves) may initiate nesting earlier than those in poorer condition (Reynolds 1972, Scott and Birkhead 1983), we also predicted that larger females are able to attain good condition and would initiate nesting earlier than would smaller females.Within species, variation in egg mass among females is high in waterfowl (Ankney and Alisauskas 1992), but few studies have attempted to determine the source of this variation.In Lesser Snow Geese (Chen c. caerulescens), about 60% of among-female variation in egg mass is heritable (Lessells et al. 1989).Such an estimate may be inflated if larger females lay larger eggs and if body size also is heritable (see Alisauskas and Ankney 1992).Indeed, egg mass is positively related to body size in Lesser Snow Geese (Newell 1988) and Northern Pintails (Anas acuta; Flint and Grand 1996).Thus, we also investigated whether egg size of female Ruddy Ducks was related to body size.Methods.--Thisstudy was conducted in 1994 in southwestern Manitoba near Minnedosa (50ø11'N, 90ø42'W).The rolling knob-and-kettle landscape is scattered with wetlands ranging in size from 10 m 2 to 4 ha (Evans et al. 1952, Dzubin 1961).Emergent vegetation in the region includes cattail (Typha spp.),
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.000 | 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".