Constructing captive ecology at the aquarium: Hierarchy, care, violence, and the limits of control
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In a time of accelerating ecological crises, captive care performed by zoos and aquariums increasingly plays a central and controversial role in attempts to resuscitate species and ecosystems rapidly disappearing from the planet. Here I use the Giant Pacific octopus ( Enteroctopus dofleini) exhibit at the Vancouver Aquarium to examine practices involved in capture and captive care at a prominent Canadian institution. As I trace how octopuses come to the Aquarium and how people work to keep them alive and healthy in this environment, I examine the complex ways violence and domination interact with care practices. Centering octopuses and their material relations in this analysis thus allows me to connect everyday care practices to systems of governance and extraction that support captive ecologies and also generate the categories used in care. Through this investigation, I find that pastoral power organizes care practices at the Vancouver Aquarium and maintains anthropocentric order in this space. Slow violence here results from the imperfect replacement of lifegiving relations, and the nature of this harm is shaped by different beings’ relationships to anthropocentric order. Hierarchical categorizations structure care practices here, and when care directed at keeping animals healthy fails, slow violence often becomes acute. Elusiveness best characterizes how octopuses confound attempts to know and care for them within this anthropocentric power structure. The theoretical lens and language I offer seeks to describe moments of rupture in anthropocentric power without romanticizing animal endangerment as liberation or (conversely) accepting the logic that harm in captivity can only diminish if care improves. Through this work, I showcase both the violence and possibilities embedded in different ways of living and relating with ecological others amidst crisis.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 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".