Interaction between learned and naturally selected features in the design of killer whale calls and their functions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
All cetaceans, and particularly all dolphins, rely heavily on acoustic signalling to survive and reproduce. The killer whale or orca is the largest dolphin and occurs in all ocean basins. Killer whales produce stereotyped calls with complex temporal and frequency structure that allow spectrographic distinction into different call components. Call components differ in directionality and attenuation and may be used to synchronize travelling and foraging behaviours by allowing recognition of whales at great distances and identification of the direction of approaching and moving senders. Killer whale communities or populations that avoid social contact may still occupy the same areas (sympatry). Members of these populations are distinguishable by ecological and social differences such as are prey preferences (fish versus mammals) and social behaviours. Mutually unintelligible call repertoires seemingly are drivers for social segregation. Calls appear to be learned traits transmitted from parent generation to offspring generation in stable matrilineal groups which form the basis of all well studied populations. This preference for social learning is the basis for stable long lasting vocal traditions or dialects and may also influence other stable behaviours such as prey preferences. The stability of dialects can be traced through the observation of acoustic divergence among groups: high dialect similarity among socializing and closely related groups diminishes with social and genetic distance leading to diverse and discrete call dialects among interbreeding clans and among non socializing, non-interbreeding communities. This pattern of selective social learning appears to be the root cause for distinct dialects which allows mate selection to avoid inbreeding and fosters cooperation among clan and community members while it also maintains social segregation and genetic isolation between non-cooperating mammal eating and fish eating populations. It is possible that call structure design together with call dialects allow killer whales to be highly efficient foragers living in tight knit genetically viable social communities at higher densities in a given area than would be possible without ecological segregation.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".