Spatial structure of harbour seal populations and the implications thereof
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A long-term study of freeze-branded harbour seals (Phoca vitulina) revealed explicit site fidelity. Individuals were followed up to 14 years of age and none of the 163 branded animals were observed to haul out beyond a 32-km distance from the site where they were branded as pups. Within this range, striking spatial segregation by age and sex prevailed. While females' site fidelity increased with age, males spent less time at their natal site with increasing age. These findings have consequences for understanding the population dynamics of harbour seals, since single "colonies" will act as partly isolated "subpopulations" in some contexts but not in others. The differing migration tendencies of the population segments lead to spatially segregated sex and age ratios of subpopulations and create a complex pattern of connectivity among these subpopulations. Ignoring the spatial scale will lead to severe misinterpretations of analyses of basic population-dynamic processes, especially rates of population increase, rates of gene flow, and the dynamics of the spread of diseases. We suggest that when studies have different aims, these should be addressed by encompassing different numbers of subpopulations.
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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 | 0.004 |
| 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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".