Thermal windows on the trunk of hauled-out seals: hot spots for thermoregulatory evaporation?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Seals have adapted to the high heat transfer coefficient in the aquatic environment by effective thermal insulation of the body core. While swimming and diving, excess metabolic heat is supposed to be dissipated mainly over the sparsely insulated body appendages, whereas the location of main heat sinks in hauled-out seals remains unclear. Here, we demonstrate thermal windows on the trunk of harbour seals, harp seals and a grey seal examined under various ambient temperatures using infrared thermography. Thermograms were analysed for location, size and development of thermal windows. Thermal windows were observed in all experimental sessions, shared some common characteristics in all seals and tended to reappear in similar body sites of individual seals. Nevertheless, the observed variations in order and location of appearance, number, size and shape of thermal windows would imply no special anatomical site for this avenue of heat loss. Based on our findings, we suggest that, in hauled-out seals, heat may be transported by blood flow to a small area of the wet body surface where the elevation of temperature facilitates evaporation of water trapped within the seals' pelages due to increased saturation vapour pressure. The comparatively large latent heat necessary for evaporation creates a temporary hot spot for heat dissipation.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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) | 0.000 | 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".