Brazilian manatees (re)discovered: Early modern accounts reflecting the overexploitation of aquatic resources and the emergence of conservation concerns
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The relationship between indigenous people and manatees in Brazil dates back to prehistoric times. It has been the subject of interdisciplinary research by specialists in marine environmental history, ethnozoology and anthropology. Manatee species, Thrichechus inunguis and Thrichechus manatus, form part of the local culture and traditions of their distribution regions: subtropical and tropical regions, as well as the entire Amazon basin and its Atlantic range. The estimated number of manatees in Brazil when the Europeans first arrived was in the tens of thousands. But the several uses of this exotic, large and strange New World creature not only meant that it featured from early times in literature, folklore and mythology, but also led to hunting and therefore falling populations. We have collected information from documentary sources that referred to manatees. These derived mainly from the early modern era, and included travel books, letters from Portuguese and Spanish missionaries and explorers, chronicles, scientific treatises, illustrated broadsheets, leaflets and images in naturalists’ records, sailors’ reports, folklore sources, poetry and literature. Our main goal was to frame and discuss the first historical accounts of the human exploitation, uses and perceptions of manatees in the Americas. This facilitated analysis of the abundance and uses of manatees from the sixteenth century to this day, as well as discussion of conservation issues, which started to emerge during the mid-eighteenth century, around overexploited resources in colonial Brazil. In focusing on manatees, and other aquatic animals, we offer paradigmatic case studies of past ecosystems and the historical relationships between people and nature.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".