Nursing behavior of wild polar bears in the Canadian High Arctic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
During 17 spring and summer field seasons between 1973 and 1999, we documented 220 bouts of nursing by dependent polar bear ( Ursus maritimus Phipps, 1774) cubs at Radstock Bay, Nunavut, Canada. The overall mean duration of nursing bouts for cubs-of-the-year (COY) and yearlings (YRLG) litters was 7.1 min (standard deviation (SD) = 3.3, range = 1–23). Mean nursing bout durations of one- and two-cub litters of COY and YRLG in spring and summer seasons ranged from 6.09 to 7.78 min and from 5.00 to 9.18 min, respectively. The overall mean duration of inter-nursing intervals for COY and YRLG litters was 5.7 h (SD = 4.9, range = 0.0–35.0). The mean inter-nursing interval for one-cub litters was 6.4 h (SD = 4.6, range = 0.0–20.2) and for two-cub litters was 5.1 h (SD = 5.1, range = 0.0–35.0). We found no evidence for effects of season or cub age class on nursing behavior. We found weak evidence that two-cub litters nurse slightly longer than one-cub litters, potentially reflecting reduced nursing efficiency due to sibling rivalry. There was neither evidence for diel patterns in nursing behavior nor a detectable relationship between the cessation of nursing and the onset of hunting or sleeping by the adult female.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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) | 0.001 | 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".