Historical anecdotes of fishing pressure: Misconstrued “sea serpent” sightings provide evidence for antecedent entanglement of marine biota in the British Isles

Abstract

Understanding social-ecological systems (SESs) through an historical lens ensures that environmental management will operate effectively. As Dearing et al. (2015) argue: "Without improved information on the long-term and complex interactions between causal factors and responses, it will be difficult to answer questions about trends, rates of change, tipping points, safe operating spaces and pre-impact conditions." Conservation biology needs such historical interpretations so its interpretations are considered complete and its proscriptions remain robust (Kittinger,

The Monstrous Anthropocene: Imaginary ‘Sea Serpents’ from the ‘Dark Continent’ Reveal an Earlier Baseline for Real Environmental Impacts to African Marine Life

“…For, as Loxton and Prothero (2015: 233) state in their polemic against cryptozoology, ' a humungous serpentine animal might resemble a string of buoys, but a group of smaller individual objects (say, an actual string of buoys) also might resemble a string of buoys' (my italics). Another dozen morphological and behavioural attributes characteristic of the Gloucester UMO have also been used as evidence for conclusions made of the prevalence of early, pre-plastic entanglement of megafauna in other regions (France 2020).…”

“…Recently, there has been recognition that some sightings of imaginary sea serpents actually provide evidence for real environmental threats (France 2017). Putative sea serpents, reinterpreted in this fashion, represent monstrous acts of the Anthropocene rather than monstrous beings from natural history, and in consequence, are better examined through a lens of historical conservation biology rather than modern cryptozoological fantasy (France 2020).…”