Oolichan Grease: A Unique Marine Lipid and Dietary Staple of the North Pacific Coast
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Oolichan grease, a dietary fat prepared from smelt-like fish, is highly prized by north Pacific coast aboriginal cultures. The composition of oolichan grease is unclear, with one report indicating a high 22:6n-3 content consistent with cold-water marine oils, but another reporting a much lower value. We noted that oolichan grease remains solid up to 15 degrees C, suggesting a low polyunsaturate content. After extracting total lipids from four fresh oolichan fish and four samples of grease, fatty acids were quantitated by high resolution gas chromatography (GC), as were additional samples of fish lipid and grease that were fractionated into triglyceride (TG), phospholipid (PL), and free fatty acids by thin-layer chromatography. In contradistinction to one prior report, we found EPA and DHA in fresh fish total lipids to be 0.9 and 2.2 wt%, respectively, while in the extracted grease, both were reduced to 0.5 wt%. Only the fresh fish PL fraction contained appreciable DHA. The bulk of the grease consisted of saturated fatty acids (30.3 wt%) and mono-unsaturates (55.0 wt%), explaining its high melting point. Excepting its very low omega-6 content (<2 wt%), oolichan grease is quite similar in composition to human adipose TG. Its solid state at environmental temperatures and low peroxidizability index made it suitable for storage and transport, explaining its status as a preferred trade item among regional aboriginal groups.
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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".