Genetic analysis of 16th-century whale bones prompts a revision of the impact of Basque whaling on right and bowhead whales in the western North Atlantic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The North Atlantic right whale, Eubalaena glacialis (Müller, 1776), is one of the world's most endangered large cetaceans. It is widely believed that Basque whalers caused the most dramatic decline of this species in the western North Atlantic during the early-16th and 17th centuries. Previous osteological analysis of 17 historic bones suggested that 50% of the Basque harvest consisted of right whales and 50% of bowhead whales, Balaena mysticetus L., 1758. This 50:50 ratio has been used to estimate pre-exploitation population size, which has subsequently formed the basis of recovery goals and plans for the North Atlantic right whale. Genetic analysis of 21 bones, 13 identified as right whales and 8 as bowhead whales through osteological examination, indicates that in fact only 1 bone was a right whale and 20 were bowhead whales. Additionally, preliminary microsatellite analyses of this specimen are not consistent with the hypothesis that whaling resulted in the low genetic variation found in this species today. These results differ from what would be expected based on any previous view of Basque whaling, and raise questions regarding the impact of Basque whaling on this species.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".