Sympathy for the devil: a conservation strategy for devil and manta rays
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background. Increased interest in luxury products and Traditional Chinese Medicine, associated with economic growth in China, has been linked to depletion of both terrestrial and marine wildlife. Among the most rapidly emerging concerns with respect to these markets is the relatively new demand for gill plates, or Peng Yu Sai (“Fish Gills”), from devil and manta rays (subfamily Mobulinae). The high value of gill plates drives international trade supplied by largely unmonitored and unregulated bycatch and target fisheries around the world. Devil and manta rays are especially sensitive to overexploitation because of their exceptionally low productivity (maximum intrinsic rate of population increase). Scientific research, conservation campaigns, as well as international and national protections that restrict fishing or trade have increased in recent years. Many key protections, however, apply only to manta rays. Methods. We review the state of the development of scientific knowledge and capacity for these species, and summarise the geographic ranges, fisheries and national and international protections for these species. We use a conservation planning approach to develop the Global Devil and Manta Ray Conservation Strategy, specifying a vision, goals, objectives, and actions to advance the conservation of both devil and manta rays. Results and Discussion. Generally, there is greater scientific attention and conservation focused on Manta compared to Devil Rays. We discuss how the successes in manta ray conservation can be expanded to benefit devil rays. We also examine solutions for the two leading threats to both devil and manta rays – bycatch and target fisheries. First, we examine how can the impact of bycatch fisheries can be reduced through international measures and best-practice handling techniques. Second, we examine the role that responsible trade and demand can play in reducing target fisheries for gill plates. Our paper suggests that given similarities in sensitivity and appearance, particularly of the dried gill plate product, conservation measures may need to be harmonised particularly for the larger species in this subfamily.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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".