The Monstrous Anthropocene: Imaginary ‘Sea Serpents’ from the ‘Dark Continent’ Reveal an Earlier Baseline for Real Environmental Impacts to African Marine Life
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For conservation biologists, determining the onset of deleterious change through recognising baseline conditions is regarded as being critical for implementing the effective management and restoration of anthropogenically-altered marine ecosystems. In particular, mining information contained within historical anecdotes from non-traditional sources can provide valuable insights about past environmental conditions. The present study demonstrates that careful parsing of eyewitness descriptions of unidentified marine objects (UMOs), considered at the time to have been sea serpents, reveals that the onset of African marine fauna becoming entangled in fishing gear or maritime debris predates, by more than a century, the advent and widespread use of plastic. This work joins other environmental histories in challenging the misconception of a destructive modernity that can be easily differentiated from an exalted past. Such a reinterpretation of what were imagined to be sea serpents joins a new re-evaluation of Mary Shelley’s Creature, both serving as metaphors of monstrosity – one, concerning the walking, the other, the swimming, undead – for social-ecological upheaval during the Anthropocene.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".