Assignment tests, telemetry and tag‐recapture data converge to identify natal origins of leatherback turtles foraging in Atlantic Canadian waters
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Investigating migratory connectivity between breeding and foraging areas is critical to effective management and conservation of highly mobile marine taxa, particularly threatened, endangered, or economically important species that cross through regional, national and international boundaries. The leatherback turtle (Dermochelys coriacea, Vandelli 1761) is one such transboundary species that spends time at breeding areas at low latitudes in the northwest Atlantic during spring and summer. From there, they migrate widely throughout the North Atlantic, but many show fidelity to one region off eastern Canada, where critical foraging habitat has been proposed. Our goal was to identify nesting beach origins for turtles foraging here. Using genetics, we identified natal beaches for 288 turtles that were live-captured off the coast of Nova Scotia, Canada. Turtles were sampled (skin or blood) and genotyped using 17 polymorphic microsatellite markers. Results from three assignment testing programs (ONCOR, GeneClass2 and Structure) were compared. Our nesting population reference data set included 1417 individuals from nine Atlantic nesting assemblages. A supplementary data set for 83 foraging turtles traced to nesting beaches using flipper tags and/or PIT tags (n = 72), or inferred from satellite telemetry (n = 11), enabled ground-truthing of the assignments. We first assigned turtles using only genetic information and then used the supplementary recapture information to verify assignments. ONCOR performed best, assigning 64 of the 83 recaptured turtles to natal beaches (77·1%). Turtles assigned to Trinidad (164), French Guiana (72), Costa Rica (44), St. Croix (7), and Florida (1) reflect the relative size of those nesting populations, although none of the turtles were assigned to four other potential source nesting assemblages. Our results demonstrate the utility of genetic approaches for determining source populations of foraging marine animals and include the first identification of natal rookeries of male leatherbacks, identified through satellite telemetry and verified with genetics. This work highlights the importance of long-term monitoring and tagging programmes in nesting and high-use foraging areas. Moreover, it provides a scientific basis for evaluating stock-specific effects of fisheries on migratory marine species, thus identifying where coordinated international recovery efforts may be most effective.
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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) | 0.001 | 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 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".