Group characteristics and spatial organization of the Eastern Beaufort Sea beluga whale (<i>Delphinapterus leucas</i>) population using aerial photographs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While it is known that beluga whales ( Delphinapterus leucas (Pallas, 1776)) are social animals, sociality within populations remains complex and poorly understood. Using aerial photographs taken in mid-July and early August 2019, we examined group characteristics and spatial organization of the Eastern Beaufort Sea beluga population in two distinct summering areas: (1) the continental shelf and offshore region of the southeast Beaufort Sea and (2) the inshore of the Mackenzie Estuary. Observations revealed that the mean group size was similar in both environments. A piecewise regression analysis showed that belugas were found to be most frequently within 24.6 m of another beluga in the offshore and within 22.0 m in the inshore. The mean interindividual distance of groups composed of subadults and (or) adults was greater than that of groups including younger whales in both environments. Also, the swimming direction of individuals in a group differed less in the offshore than in the inshore. We suggest that habitat shapes the types of activity conducted and that spatial cohesion within groups persists across environmental conditions but changes with age composition. By identifying elements of social structure and important areas for Eastern Beaufort Sea belugas, our results highlight the value of habitat conservation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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) | 0.001 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".