Feeding by grey seals on endangered stocks of Atlantic cod and white hake
Bibliographic record
Abstract
High natural mortality is preventing the recovery of collapsed stocks of Atlantic cod and white hake in the southern Gulf of St Lawrence, Canada. Predation by grey seals has been proposed as an important cause of this high mortality. We determined the contribution of cod and hake to the diet of grey seals collected along the west coast of Cape Breton Island and in the Cabot Strait, an area where overwintering cod aggregate. Along the coast of Cape Breton Island, the contribution of hake and cod to the diet was 30 and 17%, respectively, by weight using stomach contents and 13 and 9%, respectively, based on intestine contents. In the Cabot Strait, when overwintering aggregations of cod were present, cod accounted for 68% (range 57–80%) of the male diet from stomachs, and 46% (range: 31–64%) of the diet determined from intestines. Among females, cod represented 14% (range: 0–34%) and 9% (range: 3–54%) of the diet from stomachs and intestines, respectively. In Cabot Strait, white hake accounted for up to 17% of the diet by weight from stomachs, and up to 6% of the diet determined from intestines. The mean length of cod consumed by seals was 28 cm (SD = 8.6) along the coast of Cape Breton Island, and 39 cm (SD = 5.7) in Cabot Strait. The mean length of hake consumed by seals was 29 cm (SD = 7.0) along the coast of Cape Breton Island, and 35 cm (SD = 5.6) in Cabot Strait. Cod and hake are more important to the diet of males than that of females. The contribution of cod to the diet of grey seals foraging in the cod overwintering area is much greater than has been reported elsewhere.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".