Merging coastal archaeology and conservation paleobiology to evaluate shellfish resilience to Indigenous harvest over the past 3000 years
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Globally, shellfisheries are increasingly important for food, nutrition, and livelihoods. However, sustainable management of these fisheries is threatened by human activities, including climate change, overexploitation, and disruptions to natural ecosystems. Indigenous archaeological records of shellfish are ubiquitous but underutilized data sources that could expand and inform current management practices by extending or providing missing baselines for how species populations and ecosystem interactions may have changed over time. Here, we merge palaeobiological and archaeological methodologies to evaluate relative abundances of crabs and their clam prey over the past 3000 years on western Vancouver Island in the Northeast Pacific. We examine archaeological and recent shells of butter ( Saxidomus gigantea ) and littleneck clams ( Leukoma staminea ) from three locations in the Broken Group Islands, (Barkley Sound, Vancouver Island, BC, Canada) and quantify relative crab relative abundance through time by examining predation traces on clam shells. Our results indicate crab and clam population resilience despite substantial localized human harvesting pressures over approximately 3000 years, with clams increasing in abundance over time despite sustained intensive harvest. In contrast to studies in other regions of the eastern Pacific that observed recent decreases in modern crab abundances, evidence from the Broken Group Islands suggests crab populations remain stable over 3000 years, with slight but non-significant increases since the 19th century. These results are consistent with the well-established, long-term relationships Indigenous people had with shellfish resources and underscore the importance of including archaeological and paleobiological data/approaches in current conservation efforts to understand human impacts on coastal resources and ecosystems. • Relative crab population changes can be estimated using repair scars on clam valves. • We observe evidence of stable crab and clam populations over 3000 years. • Crab abundance today appears related to diminished human activities in area.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 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".