Ladoga Ringed Seal (Pusa hispida ladogensis) Can Breed on Land: A Case Study of the Nursing Period
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The ringed seal gives birth and nurses offspring in a subnivean lair in fast ice. Its breeding habitat is transforming under the impact of climate change. Here we report the outcome of an observation of a female freshwater Ladoga ringed seal (Pusa hispida ladogensis) and her pup during the 2020 breeding season, when less than 1% of Lake Ladoga was covered with ice. We located a newborn pup in a coastal zone of an island and tracked its survival on land using the camera trap method during daylight. Altogether, we captured 2978 photos, in which the seals were present in 637. The female nursed the pup at the birth site for 34 – 37 days, which is similar to the lactation period in lairs of the Arctic subspecies (36 – 41 days, 39 days on average). The female either stayed with the pup or spent time in prolonged aquatic bouts during the day. Percentage of suckling was in the range of 2.4% – 4.7% (mean 3.3%, SD = 1.1) on different days. Based on an additional video recording, we found that the pup’s behaviour was characterized by a high level of vigilance in comparison with openly breeding phocid seals. This case study indicates that the ringed seal in Lake Ladoga is able to nurse pups on land from soon after birth to pre-weaning. However, breeding success in warm springs can be constrained by predator pressure.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".