Polar Bear (<i>Ursus maritimus</i>) Behavior near Icebreaker Operations in the Chukchi Sea, 1991
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Increasing interactions of polar bears (Ursus maritimus) with human activity, combined with impacts of climate change, are of critical concern for the conservation of the species. Our study quantifies and describes initial reactions and behaviors of polar bears observed from an icebreaker during summer 1991 at two exploratory drilling sites (near sites drilled in 2015) located in the Chukchi Sea 175 km and 312 km west of Barrow, Alaska. Polar bear behavior was described using continuous sampling of six predetermined focal group behavior states (walking, running, swimming, resting, feeding or foraging, unknown) and six behavioral reaction events (no reaction, walking away, running away, approaching, vigilance [i.e., watching], unknown). Forty-six bears in 34 groups were monitored from the Robert LeMeur (an Arctic Class 3 icebreaker) for periods of five minutes to 16.1 hours. Significantly more bear groups reacted to icebreaker presence (79%) than not (21%), but no relationship was found between their reactions and distance to or activity of the icebreaker. Reactions were generally brief; vigilance was the most commonly observed reaction, followed by walking or running away for short (< 5 minutes) periods and distances (< 500 m). Eleven percent of bear groups approached the vessel. No significant difference was found between reactions when cubs were present and those when cubs were absent. Despite the limited sample sizes, these findings are relevant to assessing potential impacts of resource development and shipping activities on polar bears, especially given the sparsity of such information in the face of growing human activity in the Arctic offshore areas. Overall, climate change is leading to longer and more extensive open-water seasons in the Arctic and therefore to increasing marine traffic—more vessels (including icebreakers) for a longer time each year over a wider area.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.004 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".