Re-examining populations of beluga in the Hudson Bay-Strait Complex and assessing the impact on harvests in Nunavik and Sanikiluaq management units
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Belugas from the Hudson Bay-Strait Complex are harvested by hunters from Nunavik and Nunavut communities. In past studies, a genetic mixture analysis (GMA) was used to determine the contribution of animals from the Western Hudson Bay (WHB) and Eastern Hudson Bay (EHB) populations to harvests in the different management units. The population definition of WHB and EHB relied on short haplotypes from the mitochondrial (mt) DNA control region. However, studies with long haplotypes have shown that four populations could be identified in the Hudson Bay-Strait Complex. Here, we aim to 1) revisit the definition of populations within this area by resequencing and comparing short and long haplotypes for the mtDNA control region of 2 861 belugas, and 2) update the relative contribution of the newly-defined reference groups in management units using a GMA. Long haplotypes confirmed the existence of four previously defined populations, WHB, EHB, James Bay (JAM), and Cumberland Sound (CSB). They also allowed for the identification of a fifth population in the Belcher Islands (BEL). For the second objective, we tested the validity of the five populations using a leave-one-out approach and observed a high rate of erroneous assignments between EHB and BEL populations. Misassignments were due to shared genetic matrilineages and possible admixture during summer. Assignments were improved when EHB and BEL populations were combined in as a single reference named BEL-EHB stock. The GMA with the four new reference groups (WHB, JAM, CSB populations and BEL-EHB stock) led to higher proportions of the BEL-EHB stock in the fall harvest in Hudson Strait (5.6%) and Northeastern Hudson Bay (14.9%), and year-round in Sanikiluaq (3.3 to 61.2%), compared to previous studies using only two reference groups. Changes in reference groups, and not resequencing, likely caused most of the variation in the proportional estimate of the BEL-EHB stock in management units. Results from this study have increased the accuracy of the proportional contribution from reference groups to the harvest by the Nunavik and Nunavut (Sanikiluaq) communities.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".