Characterizing seasonal whale shark habitat in the western North Atlantic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There are significant knowledge gaps in the ecology of whale sharks Rhincodon typus beyond well-studied coastal aggregation sites. We synthesize several disparate data types, including scientific aerial and shipboard surveys, environmental impact assessments, and opportunistic citizen science records, in a species distribution model framework to characterize whale shark distribution across the northwest Atlantic Ocean (NWA), Gulf of Mexico, and the Caribbean Sea. Based on 2010 occurrence records spanning 1993-2023 from the Bay of Fundy to the North Brazil Current off the northern coast of South America, we developed a species distribution model to characterize seasonal habitat suitability for whale sharks. The model indicated that bathymetry (46.2%), sea surface temperature (21.0%), and sea surface height (16.1%) explained the most variability in habitat suitability. The model predicted high suitability in known coastal aggregation areas and continental shelf edges along the US east coast from southern Florida to Cape Hatteras year-round, expanding north to the USA-Canada border in summer and autumn. Suitability was also high in the north-central Gulf of Mexico during summer and autumn and in the Yucatan and Caribbean region throughout the year. These findings underscore a broad whale shark distribution across the NWA beyond known aggregation sites, emphasizing seasonal suitability along the US east coast and in the Gulf of Mexico. Given rapid climate-induced changes in the NWA, our findings are a critical step toward understanding climatic impacts on this charismatic species and can support marine spatial planning and conservation efforts.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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 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".