Chinese White Dolphins in the Anthropocene: Human-animal Relations Among the Islands of the Pearl River Delta
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Chinese white dolphin (Indo-Pacific humpback dolphin, Sousa chinensis ) has become a symbol of China’s Pearl River Delta in the Anthropocene. However, little scholarly attention has been paid to its role in the region’s culture. This paper takes a human-animal relations approach to ask how and why this threatened species of dolphin rose to symbolic importance in a particular delta island geography within its vast range. The paper undertakes an exploratory literature review of historical and more recent texts concerning dolphins in China and more specifically Chinese white dolphins in the Pearl River Delta. These texts range from discussions of dolphin physiology, to religious associations with dolphins, to industrial-economic explorations, to illustrated children’s books, to postage stamps and amusement park exhibits. They combine to show that Anthropocene processes have produced the Chinese white dolphin as symbolic of Hong Kong’s reunification with China and ultimately for the cohesiveness of the Pearl River Delta crossborder region as a whole, even as these spatioeconomic developments have placed the species at risk.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".