Predation on gray whales and prolonged feeding on submerged carcasses by transient killer whales at Unimak Island, Alaska
Bibliographic record
Abstract
MEPS Marine Ecology Progress Series Contact the journal Facebook Twitter RSS Mailing List Subscribe to our mailing list via Mailchimp HomeLatest VolumeAbout the JournalEditorsTheme Sections MEPS 421:229-241 (2011) - DOI: https://doi.org/10.3354/meps08906 Predation on gray whales and prolonged feeding on submerged carcasses by transient killer whales at Unimak Island, Alaska Lance G. Barrett-Lennard1,2,*, Craig O. Matkin3, John W. Durban4,5, Eva L. Saulitis3, David Ellifrit6 1Cetacean Research Program, Vancouver Aquarium, PO Box 3232, Vancouver, British Columbia V6B 3X8, Canada 2Zoology Department, University of British Columbia, #2370-6270 University Blvd., Vancouver, British Columbia V6B 1Z4, Canada 3North Gulf Oceanic Society, 3430 Main St., Suite B1, Homer, Alaska 99603, USA 4National Marine Mammal Laboratory, Alaska Fisheries Science Center, National Marine Fisheries Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 7600 Sand Point Way NE, Seattle, Washington 98115, USA 5Protected Resources Division, Southwest Fisheries Science Center, National Marine Fisheries Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 8604 La Jolla Shores Dr., La Jolla, California 92037, USA 6Center for Whale Research, 355 Smugglers Cove, Friday Harbor, Washington 98250, USA *Email: lance.barrett-lennard@vanaqua.org ABSTRACT: As apex predators, killer whales Orcinus orca are expected to strongly influence the structure of marine communities by impacting the abundance, distribution, behavior, and evolution of their prey. Empirical assessments of these impacts are difficult, however, because killer whales are sparsely distributed, highly mobile, and difficult to observe. We present a 4 yr time series of observations of foraging and feeding behavior of >150 transient killer whales that aggregate annually during the northbound migration of gray whales past Unimak Island, Alaska. Most predatory attacks were on gray whale Eschrichtius robustus calves or yearlings and were quickly abandoned if calves were aggressively defended by their mothers. Attacks were conducted by groups of 3 to 4 killer whales, which attempted to drown their prey. Gray whales generally tried to move into shallow water along the shoreline when attacked; if they succeeded in reaching depths of 3 m or less, attacks were abandoned. Kills occurred in waters from 15 to 75 m deep or were moved into such areas after death. After some hours of feeding, the carcasses were usually left, but were re-visited and fed on by killer whales over several days. Carcasses or pieces of prey that floated onshore were actively consumed by brown bears Ursus arctos, and carcasses on the bottom were fed on by sleeper sharks Somniosus pacificus, apparently increasing the local density of both species. KEY WORDS: Foraging strategy · Predatory behavior · Prey catching · Scavenger · Killer whale · Gray whale · Brown bear · Sleeper shark Full text in pdf format PreviousNextCite this article as: Barrett-Lennard LG, Matkin CO, Durban JW, Saulitis EL, Ellifrit D (2011) Predation on gray whales and prolonged feeding on submerged carcasses by transient killer whales at Unimak Island, Alaska. Mar Ecol Prog Ser 421:229-241. https://doi.org/10.3354/meps08906 Export citation RSS - Facebook - Tweet - linkedIn Cited by Published in MEPS Vol. 421. Online publication date: January 17, 2011 Print ISSN: 0171-8630; Online ISSN: 1616-1599 Copyright © 2011 Inter-Research.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".