The little auk population at the North Water Polynya. How palaeohistory, archaeology and anthropology adds new dimensions to the ecology of a high arctic seabird
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The little auk is the most numerous seabird in the north Atlantic and it has its most important breeding area on the eastern shores of the high arctic North Water Polynya in Northwest Greenland. Here an estimated population of 30 mill. pairs breeds in huge colonies. The little auk is a high arctic specialist feeding its chicks with large lipid-rich high arctic copepods. With warming of the sea the copepod species assemblage is expected to change to smaller less fatty copepod species with energetic and potentially population consequences for little auks. This presentation takes a broad interdisciplinary approach to the analysis of little auk ecology in times of change. Recent and ongoing little auk studies at the North Water Polynya have shown the high densities of little auks (about 2 pairs/m2) breeding under the stones in the vast scree slopes, the highly specialized chick diet (80 % Calanus hyperboreus), the foraging ranges (75 km, GPS tracking) the local foraging behaviour (TDR), and yearly migration pattern (gls) where little auks disperse over the north-eastern Atlantic during winter. An interdisciplinary approach has added new dimensions to population history and human harvest. Lakes with runoff from the huge colonies are hypertrophic and clear signatures can be found in cores from the lake sediment telling the colony history since the last glaciation. A history where large climatic variations but also changes caused by the historic whaling, which nearly removed the plankton-feeding Bowhead whale population, took place. Anthropological research reveals how, though small in size, little auk is a significant resource for the Inuit with important cultural values attached and adding resilience to human populations in times where the dominant marine mammal prey is inaccessible due to seasonal or yearly variations in ice conditions. Archaeological remnants show that little auk has been a resource for successive eskimo cultures inhabiting the area.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".