Upriver sightings of beluga whales (<i>Delphinapterus leucas</i>) follow storm surges and high water in the Mackenzie Delta, Northwest Territories, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Each summer, Eastern Beaufort Sea beluga whales (Delphinapterus leucas (Pallas, 1776)) form a large congregation in the Tarium Niryutait Marine Protected Area (TNMPA) in the Mackenzie River estuary, a behaviour thought to be linked to warm, freshwater conditions. In 2018, >50 belugas were observed upriver near Aklavik in the Mackenzie River Delta. Community members noted that this upriver occurrence of belugas was unusual and suggested that wind-driven high water levels in the Mackenzie River were a primary driver. We investigated this explanation by searching past communications and reports for documentation of beluga sightings upriver and identifying storm surges and water-level changes at six hydrometric stations in the Mackenzie River Delta. We found three previous occurrences of belugas upriver dating back to 2000, all of which followed prominent surges in river level attributable to coastal storms. Although acknowledging a small sample size, we suggest that upriver occurrences of beluga whales warrant further investigation through extension of the TNMPA beluga monitoring program. As climate-driven changes cause more frequent and intense Arctic storm surges, we expect storm events to increasingly overlap with the annual summer beluga congregation. This may cause upriver movements to become more common, and population-level implications are not known.
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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".