The chronology of overfishing in a remote West-African coastal ecosystem
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Classic studies of marine overexploitation traditionally analyze cases of “fishing down the food web”: turning to smaller species at lower trophic levels after depleting the larger top predators. Much less documented, however, is the preceding phase in which higher trophic level species, previously not exploited or consumed locally, are increasingly added to the catch. Worldwide, this phase happened centuries ago due to technological developments and thus passed before scientific scrutiny and conservation awareness arose, leaving it largely unstudied. Here, we combine a historical reconstruction of fishery with a relatively recent fishing monitoring program to document this early phase in the Parc National du Banc d’Arguin in Mauritania, a marine protected area in Mauritania, West Africa. Long-term trends in mean trophic level of exploited species and total catches provide evidence for an increasing fishing pressure toward the top of the food web, and suggest that the state of “fishing down the food web” is now happening in this ecosystem. This involves the recent intensive targeting of rays and sharks. We show that their contribution to the local economy is marginal compared with the traditionally fished species.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".