Genetic and behavioural data confirm the existence of a distinct harbour porpoise ecotype in West Greenland
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Elucidating the evolutionary and ecological characteristics of distinct populations constitutes a cornerstone in the classification of ecotypes, and in assessing their specific responses to environmental changes and potential impacts from human activities. In this study, two complementary approaches were deployed to investigate the existence of a putative harbour porpoise (Phocoena phocoena) ecotype in West Greenland. Genetic differentiation of 68 porpoises from West Greenland, and neighbouring Canada and Iceland were studied by ddRADseq analysis, and 18 porpoises instrumented with satellite transmitters were used to study their movement behaviour and site fidelity. The results suggest a genetically distinct harbour porpoise population in West Greenland, with strong site fidelity during the August breeding period and wide-ranging dispersal in the North Atlantic at other seasons. This adds to previously described unique characteristics of West Greenland harbour porpoises, including mesopelagic foraging behaviour, distinct skull morphology and tooth ultrastructure, and shorter, yet heavier, body; all pointing to the existence of a distinct West Greenland ecotype. We hypothesize that this ecotype arose through gradual adaptation to the local environmental conditions of the West Greenlandic shelf area, including high summer primary productivity and seasonal sea ice coverage. Consequently, this distinct ecotype of harbour porpoises necessitates a focused conservation plan.
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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 | 0.002 |
| 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".