Geographic Distribution of North Atlantic Humpback Whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) with Fluke Scars Caused by Killer Whales (Orcinus orca)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although killer whale (Orcinus orca) predation on humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) is rarely witnessed, resultant scars on humpback flukes provide evidence of non-lethal interactions. Humpback whale photo-identification catalogs from the North Atlantic were used to evaluate humpback flukes (n = 10,957) for the presence and severity of killer whale scarification (e.g., rake marks, teeth indentations, missing tissue). Flukes were coded as none, light, moderate, or severe based on the extent of scarring. Even with increased sample sizes, especially for Norway and Iceland, the distribution of high-latitude humpbacks with killer whale scarring was consistent with prior studies: Atlantic Canada (21.7%), West Greenland (15.5%), Gulf of Maine (13.5%), Iceland (combined with East Greenland, 9.3%), and Norway (7.9%). For the first time, scarring rates are presented based on data from Ireland, Scotland, and England (11.0%) as well. Scarring frequencies generally differed between the eastern and western North Atlantic despite the co-occurrence of all migrating humpbacks in low-latitude breeding grounds, suggesting the occurrence of killer whale interactions in the distinct feeding grounds or along northward migration routes. While it was not possible to determine exactly where these interactions took place, the likelihood of a killer whale encounter and subsequent scar acquisition was greatest for humpbacks that feed in Atlantic Canada.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 |
| 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) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
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".