Movements, habitat use and feeding success of cultural clans of South Pacific sperm whales
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Summary The population of sperm whales ( Physeter macrocephalus ) in the South Pacific is divided into at least five sympatric vocal clans that almost certainly reflect cultural variation. We investigated differences in movements and feeding success of groups from different clans off the Galápagos Islands and northern Chile, using data from 87 days spent tracking groups of known clan. Groups from different clans showed different use of habitat and movement patterns. Off the Galápagos Islands, ‘Plus‐one’ clan groups moved in relatively straight lines while ‘Regular’ clan groups had more convoluted tracks and a more inshore distribution, patterns which were consistent across years. Groups from different clans had different defecation rates, indicating between‐clan variation in feeding success. Off the Galápagos Islands, ‘Plus‐one’ clan groups were more successful in the depauperate ENSO (‘El Niño/Southern Oscillation’) conditions of 1987. However, in the cooler conditions of 1989, groups of the ‘Regular’ clan had much higher feeding success than those of the ‘Plus‐one’ clan. Thus we suggest that cultural inheritance in sperm whales incorporates foraging strategy as well as vocal patterns, and that clan membership has fitness consequences. That clans seem differentially affected by altered climate conditions has implications for the effects of global warming on sperm whales. The results also support the hypothesis that culturally determined differences in fitness may have affected genetic evolution through the process of cultural hitchhiking.
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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".