The ecological and behavioral significance of short-term food caching in polar bears (<i>Ursus maritimus</i>)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The paucity of observations of wild polar bears (Ursus maritimus) caching of food (including hoarding, i.e., burying and remaining with a kill for up to a few days) has led to the conclusion that such behavior does not occur or is negligible in this species. We document 19 observations of short-term hoarding by polar bears between 1973 and 2018 in Svalbard, Greenland, and Canada. Short-term hoarding appears to be influenced by size of the kill and its remaining energetic value after the first meal has been consumed. Fat and meat from smaller seals, such as pup or yearling ringed seals (Pusa hispida), are largely devoured immediately, leaving little to hoard. Carcasses of adult ringed seals, harp seals (Pagophilus groenlandicus), and bearded seals (Erignathus barbatus) may be covered with snow to reduce the chance of kleptoparasitism by another bear or other scavengers visually detecting a dark spot on the ice, while the hoarding bear lies nearby. Hoarding of other species, such as beluga (Delphinapterus leucas) (calves or parts) or other polar bears, appears opportunistic. We review differences in caching, including short-term hoarding behavior between polar bears and brown bears (U. arctos), and hypothesize about factors that may have influenced their evolution.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".