Abstract
Marine conservation biologists have increasingly acknowledged the value of non-traditional sources such as historical anecdotes for providing useful information about past conditions of social-ecological systems as part of a comprehensive management strategy for recognizing and setting trajectories toward re-establishing baseline conditions. The present study demonstrates that careful parsing of eyewitness accounts of unidentified marine objects (UMOs), which at the time had been purported to be sea serpents of the “many-humped” or “string-of-buoys” typology, reveals that marine animals in the Western Pacific have been victims of non-lethal entanglement in fishing gear for much longer than is commonly believed. The temporal baseline for onset of entanglement in this region certainly predates the mid-twentieth-century use of plastic in fisheries and other maritime operations.
Highlights
Historical information is deemed essential to “answer questions about trends, rates of change, tipping points, safe operating spaces and pre-impact conditions” in complex social-ecological systems (SESs) (Dearing et al, 2015)
The present study demonstrates that careful parsing of eyewitness accounts of unidentified marine objects (UMOs), which at the time had been purported to be sea serpents of the “many-humped” or “string-of-buoys” typology, reveals that marine animals in the Western Pacific have been victims of non-lethal entanglement in fishing gear for much longer than is commonly believed
The working premise is that, if Alverson et al (1994) and a senior NOAA scientist interviewed by Deedy (2017) are correct, and bycatch and non-lethal entanglement have existed ever since fishing began and humans first hurled spears and floats into the waves and set nets in the water (Fagan, 2017), it should be possible to detect their presence hidden in the anecdotes of historical sightings of misconstrued sea serpents
Summary
Historical information is deemed essential to “answer questions about trends, rates of change, tipping points, safe operating spaces and pre-impact conditions” in complex social-ecological systems (SESs) (Dearing et al, 2015). Conservation biology benefits from inclusion of such temporal information in order to ensure its interpretations are sound and its proscriptions meritorious. One of the challenges faced in marine historical ecology is being able to back-cast the period of reference from which to detect the onset of deleterious change (Engelhard et al, 2016). Given the rarity of temporal consistency among quantitative metrics such as species abundance, qualitative variables can serve as surrogates of Anthropocene alterations. Dearing et al (2015), for example, show how archival documents can be used to reconstruct integrated regional histories about landscapes, ecosystems, and resources Given the rarity of temporal consistency among quantitative metrics such as species abundance, qualitative variables can serve as surrogates of Anthropocene alterations. Dearing et al (2015), for example, show how archival documents can be used to reconstruct integrated regional histories about landscapes, ecosystems, and resources
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