Water mass structure defines the diapausing copepod distribution in a right whale habitat on the Scotian Shelf
Bibliographic record
Abstract
North Atlantic right whales Eubalaena glacialis aggregate in Roseway Basin on the western Scotian Shelf where their energy-rich food sources, diapausing copepods Calanus spp., are concentrated at depth. The Canadian Species at Risk Recovery Strategy for right whales provides provisional Critical Habitat (CH) boundaries for Roseway Basin based on right whale occupancy, with the stipulation that the boundaries be refined using spatially explicit indicators of CH, specifically the environmental, oceanographic, and bathymetric conditions responsible for the copepod aggregations and distribution. We measured the concentration, energy density, spatial distribution, and extent of the right whale food base and the related oceanography at depth in the Basin during late-summer 2008 with the goal of refining the spatial extent of right whale CH. We show that the diapausing copepods were distributed throughout the Basin, with elevated concentrations located at depth toward the northeast and along the southern Basin margin slope. The aggregations were associated with warm, salty, high-density (26.0 to 26.2 t, kg m -3 ), continental slope-influenced water masses and not with cold, fresh, low-density (< 26.0 t ) water masses originating on the Scotian Shelf. Tidally driven variation in the copepod aggregations across the southern slope was coincident with the movement of the 26.0 t isopycnal. We propose a mechanism, based on water mass density and advection, that explains the spatial and temporal (e.g. inter-annual) variation in diapausing Calanus energy density (joules per unit ocean volume) distribution, and by proxy, variation in right whale occupancy of the Basin. We further propose that the provisional CH boundaries, partly conditioned on vessel-strike mitigation measures, be extended to better encompass the critical feeding habitat. This could be achieved without compromise regarding vessel traffic and existing vessel-strike mitigation.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.026 | 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".