Social structure in northern bottlenose whales: Stable relationships without stable groups
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Uncovering the drivers and function(s) of social relationships across a wide range of species is key to understanding the ecology and evolution of social behaviour. Northern bottlenose whales have been identified as a particularly important case study for social evolution. Unlike other large, toothed whale species which live in kin-based social units, northern bottlenose whales appear to form fluid, fission-fusion communities. However, this understanding has not been revisited in over 20 years, and new lines of evidence suggest that female relationships may have been underestimated in previous work. Drawing on 35 years of photo-identification data, we used Bayesian social network and binomial mixture models to quantify social relationships between individuals. Northern bottlenose whale social networks had very low modularity but high social differentiation, indicating strong social preferences in the absence of stable groups or community partitions. Contrary to previous work, we found evidence for strong, long-lasting relationships among females, not just males. Though kinship had little influence on social relationships, age differences and residency influenced patterns of association. Broadly, this analysis supports the hypothesis that northern bottlenose whales exhibit a social system more similar to smaller, less sexually dimorphic toothed whales, such as dolphins. This work highlights the value of long-term ecological research for quantifying the social lives of long-lived species.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 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) | 0.001 | 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".