Thailand's online reptile market decreases but shifts toward native species during COVID-19
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The recent COVID-19 pandemic presented the world with a crisis of incredible scale and made wildlife markets the focal point of authorities. Scientific literature on COVID-19 and wildlife trade overwhelmingly focused on the zoonotic risks of wildlife markets. As many physical marketplaces for wildlife were faced with closure or restrictions to curb the spread of COVID-19, alternative sale platforms were sought. I monitored social media platforms in Thailand during the pandemic and compared this with data obtained in 2016. I found a significant reduction of lizards and snakes offered for sale on social media, compared with before the pandemic. Although the quantity decreased, I found that the number of species almost doubled in snakes, of which unprotected native species increased by 245%. Transport restrictions would limit the mobility of harvesters and interrupts trade chains, and thus could explain the reduced number of snakes and lizards for sale. However, the increase in native species for sale shows that the impact of this international trade disruption could shift focus from international trade to what is locally available. Potentially having serious consequences for the conservation of local species and in line with previous studies documenting increased poaching rates and wildlife crime incidents.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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".