Shark‐inflicted mortality on a population of harbour seals (<i>Phoca vitulina</i>) at Sable Island, Nova Scotia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Shark‐inflicted mortality on harbour seals Phoca vitulina on Sable Island, Nova Scotia, was studied from 1980 to 1997, based on carcasses washed up on shore. During this period, pup production declined dramatically from over 600 in 1989 to 40 in 1997. Between 1980 and 1992, pup deaths only were recorded, and only during the May–June pupping period, while deaths in all age groups were recorded year‐round between 1993 and 1997; 458 pups, 23 juveniles and 241 adults were found. Shark‐inflicted mortality in pups, as a proportion of total production, was under 10% during 1980–93, roughly 25% in 1994–95, and increased to 45% in 1996. Shark‐inflicted mortality occurred in all months except December, January and February, with c. 80% of the pups killed during the pupping period, and 97% of the adults killed outside the pupping period. The decline in pup production was not only a result of reduced recruitment owing to pup mortality. A greater proportion of reproductive females than males was killed. We estimate that shark‐inflicted mortality on pups and adult females reduced pup production on Sable Island by 43 to 154 pups annually between 1993 and 1997. Our results indicate that sharks are having an impact on Sable Island harbour seals, possibly to the extent of limiting population growth, or contributing to the observed population decline. Potential reasons for this increased mortality are discussed.
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 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.027 | 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".