What can Captive Whales tell us About their Wild Counterparts? Identification, Usage, and Ontogeny of Contact Calls in Belugas ( Delphinapterus leucas )
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Contact calls are ubiquitous in social birds and mammals. Belugas are among the most vocal of cetaceans, but the function of their calls is poorly understood. In a previous study we hypothesized that a broad band pulsed call type labeled “Type A,” serves as a contact call between mothers and their calves. Here we examined context-specific use of call types recorded from a captive beluga social group at the Vancouver Aquarium, and found that the Type A call comprised 24% to 97% of the vocalizations during isolation, births, death of a calf, presence of external stressors, and re-union of animals after separation. In contrast it comprised 4.4% of the vocalizations produced during regular sessions. We grouped 2835 Type A calls into five variants, A1 to A5. A discriminant function analysis classified 87% of calls in the same groupings that we assigned them to by ear and visual examination of spectrograms. The variants do not represent individual signatures. One variant, A1, was used by three related individuals: an adult female, her male calf and his juvenile half-sister. Our previous research documented the gradual development of the A1 variant by the male calf, until at 20 months he was producing stereotyped renditions of his mother and sister’s A1. We used our findings to generate testable predictions about the usage of these signals by wild belugas. We verified the existence of signals with the same distinctive features as the contact calls found in captivity in the repertoire of St. Lawrence Estuary herds, and documented their usage by two wild individuals from different populations. In the St. Lawrence, these were emitted by a female calling after a dead-calf. In Hudson Bay, by a temporarily restrained juvenile. We propose that these calls function in nature, a sin captivity, to maintain group cohesion, and that the variants shared by related animals are used for mother-calf recognition.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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 it