Fatty acid‐based diet estimates suggest ringed seal remain the main prey of southern Beaufort Sea polar bears despite recent use of onshore food resources
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Polar bears ( Ursus maritimus ) from the southern Beaufort Sea (SB) subpopulation have traditionally fed predominantly upon ice‐seals; however, as the proportion of the subpopulation using onshore habitat has recently increased, foraging on land‐based resources, including remains of subsistence‐harvested bowhead whales ( Balaena mysticetus ) and colonial nesting seabirds has been observed. Adipose tissue samples were collected from this subpopulation during the springs of 2013–2016 and analyzed for fatty acid signatures. Diet estimates were generated for the proportional consumption of ringed seal ( Pusa hispida ), bearded seal ( Erignathus barbatus ), and beluga whale ( Delphinapterus leucas ), relative to onshore foods, including bowhead whale remains and seabird, as represented by black guillemot ( Cepphus grylle mandtii ) nestlings and eggs. Quantitative fatty acid signature analysis (QFASA) estimated that the ice‐obligate prey, ringed seal, remained the predominant prey species of SB polar bears (46.4 ± 1.8%), with much lower consumption of bearded seal (19.6 ± 2.0%), seabird (17.0 ± 1.2%), bowhead whale (15.0 ± 1.4%), and hardly any beluga whale (2.0 ± 0.5%). Adult and subadult females appeared to depend more on the traditional ringed seal prey than adult and subadult males. Diet estimates of SB polar bears showed significant interannual variability for all prey ( F 12, 456 = 3.17, p < .001). Longer‐term estimates suggested that both types of onshore prey, bowhead whale remains and seabird, have represented a moderate proportion of the food resources used by SB polar bears since at least the start of the 21st Century.
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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".