Fin, Humpback, and Minke Whale Foraging Events in the New York Bight as Observed from Aerial Surveys, 2017-2020
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The fin whale (Balaenoptera physalus), humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae), and minke whale (Balaenoptera acutorostrata) are known to occur in the New York Bight (NYB). The primary North Atlantic feeding grounds for these large whale species are commonly recognized to be further north in waters of the Gulf of Maine, eastern Canada, West Greenland, and the eastern North Atlantic (e.g., Iceland, Norway, Ireland, Scotland). Although much is known about their feeding activities in the North Atlantic, relatively little is known about their occurrence and foraging behaviors in mid-Atlantic regions such as the NYB. Understanding how large whales utilize NYB waters is important to evaluate potential impacts from direct (e.g., offshore development, vessel strikes, entanglements) and indirect (e.g., rising ocean temperatures) anthropogenic sources. The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation funded a 3-year baseline monitoring program (2017-2020) which conducted monthly line-transect aerial surveys focused on large whales. Over 3 years, 36 surveys comprised of 263 flights and totaling 688.3 hours of observation time along 140,370 km of over-water flight path were completed. Aerial survey observers documented foraging events for the fin, humpback, and minke whales, including mixed-species aggregations, and analyzed other parameters such as distance from shore, distribution zones, and presence of fish schools. Foraging behavior was observed for 27% of the recorded fin whale sightings, 40% of the recorded humpback whale sightings, and 18% of the recorded minke whale sightings. Sighting rates of foraging whales were highest for humpback whales (4.4 whales/1,000 km of effort), followed by fin whales (0.6 whales/1,000 km effort) and minke whales (0.1 whales/1,000 km of effort), and varied by season, year, and distribution zone. In addition, nearly 5,700 fish schools were recorded with fish presence highest during summer and fall.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".