Tusâven? Acoustic observation of baleen whale species composition and seasonal presence in the Torngat Area of Interest, Nunatsiavut, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Nunatsiavut is a transition zone between Arctic and lower-latitude marine mammals in the southeastern Canadian Arctic. However, knowledge of baleen whale species and their habitat use in the Torngat Area of Interest (TAOI), northern Nunatsiavut, is limited. This study examined the seasonal presence and acoustic behavior of bowhead, fin, humpback, and sei whales in the TAOI through underwater sound recordings collected offshore from Saglek Bank between October 2022 and September 2023. Species-specific calls were identified by visually analyzing spectrograms every 30 minutes and included fin whale 20Hz downsweeps, sei whale 90Hz downsweeps, humpback whale song, and bowhead whale frequency modulated calls. A call parameter measurement tool was applied to measure signal characteristics, including contour creation and receive levels. The relationships between acoustic presence and environmental factors, such as sea ice concentration and solar elevation angle were examined. Fin whale 20Hz downsweeps were the most frequently detected calls, occurring from October to mid-January and again from June through the end of the deployment in September. Sei whale 90Hz downsweeps were detected during ice-free periods, from October to early January and again from late July to September. Humpback whale songs were only detected in the fall of 2022, during October and November, while bowhead whale frequency-modulated calls were recorded intermittently in the spring and summer, from late May to August. While we did not have enough acoustic detections to confidently observe if there was a diel calling pattern in bowhead and sei whale calls, both fin and humpback whales had a peak in acoustic activity during the night. These findings provide a new understanding of the acoustic presence of baleen whale species, highlighting the TAOI's ecological significance for these whales and the importance of addressing environmental factors in monitoring low-frequency vocalizations.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".