Kin selection and allocare in sperm whales
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cooperative care and defense of young are hypothesized to be foundational to the societies of several species, including the sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus). However, the extent of allocare among sperm whales and the mechanisms driving it have not been well-characterized. Sperm whale social units are matrilineally based, making kin selection a likely key driver of allocare, but the relationship between kinship and calf care is essentially unknown. We investigate calf care in the context of kinship, by combining association and interaction data with genetic profiles for 16 calves from 7 eastern Caribbean social units. Mothers were the primary associate for 62.5% of calves, and the primary nurse for 87.5%, so behavioral observations are not always sufficient for assigning maternity. Babysitting and allonursing were frequent in some cases, particularly for calves less than a year old. Within social units, babysitting rates were correlated with relatedness (rs = 0.4, P < 0.05), and allonurses were, on average, closer maternal relatives of the calves they nursed than were available females who were not allonurses (Δr = 0.14, P = 0.054). Exceptions to the overall positive relationship between allocare and kinship suggest that additional factors influencing allocare among sperm whales may include reciprocity, group augmentation and gaining maternal experience.
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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) | 0.004 | 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".