“The species’ age of innocence was over :” the capture and display of orcas (Orcinus orca) in British Columbia, conservation, and the extraction of value, 1964-1975
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In July 1964, two fishers, commissioned by the Vancouver Aquarium, accidentally harpooned and captured a live orca off the coast of Saturna Island in British Columbia. The orca’s, dubbed Moby Doll, subsequent short-lived life in captivity was marked by intense public curiosity and shifting debates about the value of the species. This thesis examines the cases of the first three orcas captured and/or displayed alive in British Columbia: Moby Doll, Namu, and Skana. It argues that shifts in the perception of orcas, from a nuisance species to a regional icon, were entangled in methods of extracting value from the species. These values: monetary, scientific, and nationalistic were projected onto orcas by various entities and reflected broader political currents in, firstly, WAC Bennett, then Dave Barrett’s British Columbia. As political transformations occurred in the province and more broadly, captured orcas were connected with broader resource extraction in the province as institutions, unions, individuals, and eventually conservationists sought to extract value from the species. This thesis centres Vancouver and British Columbia. By analyzing newspaper coverage, correspondence, press releases, and archival records relating particularly to the Vancouver Aquarium, this study demonstrates how the perception of value of the species shifted with capture and display
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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".