Reliability of photographic and molecular techniques for sexing northern bottlenose whales (<i>Hyperoodon ampullatus</i>)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Identifying the sex of living cetaceans can be difficult, even when species are sexually dimorphic. We compare two methods of molecular sexing (ZFY (zinc finger protein gene) and SRY (sex-determining region Y gene)) and evaluate the effectiveness of photographic techniques for identifying sex in northern bottlenose whales, Hyperoodon ampullatus, in the Gully, off Nova Scotia, Canada. Samples from individuals of known sex from historic Norwegian whaling (n = 19) and from recent strandings (n = 3) were used to test the reliability of the molecular techniques. Although both methods gave accurate results, the ZFY method was found to be unsuitable for degraded (historic) samples, owing to the large size of the target DNA fragment. Results from the two molecular-sexing methods were in agreement for biopsy samples taken from bottlenose whales in the Gully (7 males and 13 females). Photographs of the melon profile were used to assign free-swimming animals to the categories female - immature male, subadult male, and mature male. Melon photographs of adult-sized animals taken up to 7 years apart were consistently assigned to the same category. Overall, sex identification from melon photographs was in agreement with results from molecular sexing. However, animals in the category female - immature male were difficult to assign on the basis of morphological features alone.
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 machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".