Rewriting the history of an extinction—was a population of Steller's sea cows ( <i>Hydrodamalis gigas</i> ) at St Lawrence Island also driven to extinction?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Kommandorskiye Islands population of Steller's sea cow (Hydrodamalis gigas) was extirpated ca 1768 CE. Until now, Steller's sea cow was thought to be restricted in historic times to Bering and Copper Islands, Russia, with other records in the last millennium from the western Aleutian Islands. However, Steller's sea cow bone has been obtained by the authors from St Lawrence Island, Alaska, which is significantly further north. Bone identity was verified using analysis of mitochondrial DNA. The nitrogen-15 (δ(15)N)/carbon-13 (δ(13)C) values for bone samples from St Lawrence Island were significantly (p ≤ 0.05) different from Bering Island samples, indicating a second population. Bone samples were dated to between 1030 and 1150 BP (approx. 800-920 CE). The samples date from close to the beginning of the mediaeval warm period, which could indicate that the population at St Lawrence Island was driven to extinction by climate change. A warming of the climate in the area may have changed the availability of kelp; alternatively or in addition, the animals may have been driven to extinction by the expansion of the Inuit from the Bering Strait region, possibly due to opening waterways, maybe following bowhead whales (Balaena mysticetus), or searching for iron and copper. This study provides evidence for a previously unknown population of sea cows in the North Pacific within the past 1000 years and a second Steller's sea cow extirpation event in recent history.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".