Movement responses to environment: fast inference of variation among southern elephant seals with a mixed effects model
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Like many species, movement patterns of southern elephant seals (Mirounga leonina) are being influenced by long-term environmental change. These seals migrate up to 4,000 km from their breeding colonies, foraging for months in a variety of Southern Ocean habitats. Understanding how movement patterns vary with environmental features and how these relationships differ among individuals employing different foraging strategies can provide insight into foraging performance at a population level. We apply new fast-estimation tools to fit mixed effects within a random walk movement model, rapidly inferring among-individual variability in southern elephant seal environment-movement relationships. We found that seals making foraging trips to the sea ice on or near the Antarctic continental shelf consistently reduced speed and directionality (move persistence) with increasing sea-ice coverage but had variable responses to chlorophyll a concentration, whereas seals foraging in the open ocean reduced move persistence in regions where circumpolar deep water shoaled. Given future climate scenarios, open-ocean foragers may encounter more productive habitat but sea-ice foragers may see reduced habitat availability. Our approach is scalable to large telemetry data sets and allows flexible combinations of mixed effects to be evaluated via model selection, thereby illuminating the ecological context of animal movements that underlie habitat usage.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
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 it