Southern elephant seal vagrants in Ecuador: a symptom of La Niña events?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Extralimital observations of pinnipeds are important to understand the effects of changing climates on our oceans and the distribution of these species. The southern elephant seal (Mirounga leonina) is a known vagrant species that moves over long distances. We report three new records of M. leonina in interior freshwater tributaries of the Guayas River Estuary Basin (Gulf of Guayaquil) and northern coast of Ecuador between October 2017 and January 2018 during a cold episode of La Nina event in the southeastern Pacific. The elephant seals were identified according to their large size (~ 5 m for adult and 2–3 m for juveniles/subadults), the head to neck size ratio, and the size and external morphology of the proboscis, which was used as a key trait to differentiate M. leonina from the Northern elephant seal (M. angustirostris). The observations of M. leonina in Ecuador highlight an extreme movement covering an assumed total distance of approximately 8000 km from the circumpolar region. The cold event "La Niña" with sea surface temperature anomalies ranging − 1.5 °C to − 0.5 °C in October 2017 likely triggered the extralimital movements of these animals. Recurring observations of M. leonina in the Guayaquil Gulf suggest the importance of this highly productive region and tropical estuarine-riverine habitats as temporary haulout sites for resting. These new findings indicate that vagrant individuals influenced by oceanographic events and eco-physiological processes are reaching this region more frequently than previously thought.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".