Migration and foraging strategies at varying spatial scales in western North Atlantic right whales: a review of hypotheses
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Western North Atlantic right whales (Eubalaena glacialis) utilise several important foraging habitats off the northeastern United States andeastern Canada, where they feed on dense patches of zooplankton. At a fundamental level, a right whale’s optimal strategy should be tolocate and exploit the prey patches with the highest net energetic return from foraging. There remain many questions, however, concerningtheir migration and foraging strategies and the environmental cues and sensory modalities involved in migration and foraging, all of whichare likely to vary at different spatial scales. For example, a right whale most likely uses different mechanisms and strategies for locationof primary feeding grounds than those used for detection of optimum prey patches within a feeding area. This paper proposes a multi-scaled,hierarchical, conceptual model of right whale migratory and foraging strategies and presents a variety of hypotheses concerning themechanisms involved. Right whales may return to the general area of their feeding grounds based on prior experience. The locations ofsuccessful foraging in the immediately preceding years are likely to be re-visited, as are habitats to which an animal was exposed whileaccompanying its mother during its first year of life. It is also possible that the whales utilise large- or medium-scale environmental cues,such as currents, temperature discontinuities, or salinity signals indicating coastal plumes, to locate likely areas of high zooplankton patchdensity. Whilst on their feeding grounds, right whales tend to be aggregated, but there are usually outliers which may represent occasionalexcursions in search of other prey patches, though there is currently no evidence to address whether they communicate information aboutprey to other individuals. Their behaviour whilst actively feeding indicates that they can detect differences in patch density and adjust theirbehaviour accordingly. A likely sensory mechanism for quantification of patch density and triggering of feeding behaviour would be thevibrissae around the anterior opening of the mouth.
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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) | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 |
| 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".