Sand tiger shark Carcharias taurus mating season in the northwest Atlantic Ocean inferred from wound healing dynamics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract All sharks and rays reproduce using internal fertilization. This necessitates males and females to be coupled tightly during copulation, and as a result, bite wounds associated with mating occur. The appearance of these bite wounds can be used to gauge the timeframe of mating activity without direct observation of copulation. A wound staging system was developed for the sand tiger shark Carcharias taurus through longitudinal observations of an aquarium-housed female that sustained a full-thickness mating wound, an injury that extends through the epidermis, dermis, and hypodermis, exposing underlying muscle. Four wound stages were established: (1) full-thickness, (2) healing, (3) closure, and (4) scar revision. The female’s stage 1 (full thickness) wound transitioned to stage 2 (healing) 2 weeks post-injury. Stage 3 (wound closure) was observed 3–6 weeks post-injury and stage 4 (scar revision) followed and persisted for the duration of the study, 35 weeks post-injury. The staging system was used to characterize the incidence, severity, and etiology of wounds for in situ sharks aggregating at North Carolina shipwreck sites from digital images contributed to the Spot A Shark USA database. There was a significant association between wound stage and its location or zone on the body as well as season of the year for males and females. Mating wounds on females corroborate a late spring and early summer mating season. The presence of stages 1 and 2 mating wounds on sand tiger sharks in North Carolina suggests the area is used for mating while females with stages 3 and 4 mating wounds provide evidence that the area also serves as gestation habitat for this species. This research highlights minimally invasive methodology that leverages citizen science divers to further characterize the reproductive life history of sand tiger sharks.
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 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 | 0.000 | 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".