Narwhal hunting by Pond Inlet Inuit: An analysis of foraging mode in the floe-edge environment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The harvesting of narwhals by Baffin Island Inuit represents an important relationship in terms of the continuous utilization of an indigenous marine resource. However, research on Inuit hunting with respect to narwhals has been mainly confined to harvest counts despite the major role narwhals play in the local northern Baffin subsistence system. The present research examines Pond Inlet Inuit foraging behaviour for narwhals in the spring floe-edge environment. While sea ice is one of the most dominant features of the arctic marine environment for much of any year, it is in the spring that the dynamism of its physical and biological characteristics is most notable. This was especially evident at the fast ice-open water interface, or floe-edge, where rapid physical change in the condition of the ice is frequent and summer migratory marine mammals and birds are present in large numbers. In this paper, analysis of 14 observed hunts indicates that Inuit utilization of the spring floe edge for narwhal hunting, in contrast to most other hunt types, follows a sit-and-wait mode of foraging. The study also explicates aspects of Pond Inlet hunters traditional ecological knowledge necessary to travel and conduct harvesting operations successfully in this complex environment.
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.
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 | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 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".