Pinnipeds in Arctic Canada show no evidence of retained microplastic pollution
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As the threat of plastic pollution continues to loom heavily over the global environment, the Arctic has drawn increasing research interest as a potential sink for debris.More specific to the Canadian Arctic, it is unclear whether marine mammals accumulate microplastics (MPs: 5mm).Pinnipeds, like walrus (Odobenus rosmarus) and ringed seals (Pusa hispida), are both ecologically and culturally significant, which poses a risk to northern food security.Here, I present the first assessment of MPs in Canadian walrus by examining the stomachs of 36 animals from Nunavut.Additionally, I expand on existing literature by evaluating the stomachs of 10 ringed seals from the Northwest Territories, Canada.I detected no MPs ≥ 80µm in any of the animals.This result suggests that walrus and seals in the Canadian Arctic either do not retain MPs or are not exposed to them, which is consistent with studies from similar regions.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".