First deity, then monster, now shiny treasure; giant clams, the world’s largest marine bivalve molluscs, have held many amorphous names throughout the centuries. Today, their chapter as the “jade of the sea” highlights both their dual and conflicting roles: their ecological significance in supporting and monitoring coral reefs, and their high value for the food, shell, and aquarium trades. 

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Like the whale or the octopus, few creatures have been as highly mythologised in the annals of sea folklore as the giant clam. An article published in a 1924 issue of Popular Mechanics magazine, titled ‘Giant Clams Trap Sea Divers in Grip of Shells’, described the vice-like grip of clams, ensnaring unsuspecting divers unfortunate enough to step into the “open lips of the monsters” as shells closed “with such force that they serve as gigantic traps.” Coined “man-eater” and “killer clams”, this reputation is far from earned.

There are no records of battles where giant clams emerge victorious. Instead, the opposite has been proven, as giant clams share the same endangered fate as almost all ocean species. Directly, as they are handpicked and cracked open with a knife to excise their translucent white meat or dredged by large vessels for their opal shell; and indirectly, impacted by the aftermath of anthropogenic activities driving warming and acidifying waters, the true extent to which scientists have yet to fully determine. 

In her book ‘The Sound of the Sea: Seashells and the Fate of Our Oceans’, environmental journalist Cynthia Barnett traces the cultural history of giant clams and their tumultuous relationship with people. The giveaway is in the name: one of two genera of giant clams, Tridacna, contains the Greek words “tri” and “dakno”, translating to “three bites.” This was, as aptly put by Barnett, “originally meant to describe not clams biting humans, but humans biting clams.”

Colourful mantles contain light sensitive photoreceptors, known as iridocytes, and support symbiosis with zooxanthellae.

Shiny Lives of Giant Clams

As the world’s largest marine bivalve molluscs, giant clams comprise at least 12 extant species. The largest representative and heavyweight champion, Tridacna gigas, is a creature of superlatives, with some individuals growing to over 120cm in shell length and weighing over 250 kilograms. On a scale, these bivalve behemoths rival an African lion or American grizzly bear. 

Along the shallow, sun-dappled coasts across the Indo-Pacific, giant clams lie sessile on coral reefs, seemingly so sedentary that they would impress the idlest of life forms. However, scientists have observed the giant clams’ surprising locomotive functions, from free-swimming larvae when expunged from their parent to juvenile clams using a retractable “foot” to scuttle across sandy seabeds and find suitable settlement. Distinct from their cockle cousins, who face the sky, giant clams have rotated underside; their hinge and foot lie nestled next to each other at the bottom to find anchorage. It is said that this distinctive evolution “indicates long and intimate association with coral reefs.”

Even after reaching maturity, their life cycle is far from over. Dr Neo Mei Lin, a marine biologist at the National University of Singapore, and her collaborators documented the numerous ways in which giant clams act as industrious engineers of their ecosystem, busy at work: they are providers of food and shelter, contributors to productivity, and act as reef architects and builders.

As a living kaleidoscope, the mantles of giant clams are adorned with prismatic colours that catch and shift underwater light, such as blues, purples, greens, and gold. The brightly reflective cells, called iridocytes, act as photo-receptors to detect changes in light intensity, like how the human eye may refract and process light. These colours are not mere ornamentation; rather, the vibrant mantle and tissues, like underwater citadels, harbour a bustling community of microscopic algae, known as zooxanthellae. These tiny tenants photosynthesise and provide nutrients in payment.

Sponges, corals, and invertebrates all find refuge in the nooks and crannies of the clam’s shell, creating a microcosm within the reef ecosystem. At a larger scale, giant clams provide calcium carbonate, incorporated into the foundations of the reef. As filter feeders, giant clams draw in water from their surroundings and, in doing so, accumulate any pollutants present in the water, effectively providing a living record of environmental changes over time.

This living record is what makes them invaluable biomonitors, their health and wellbeing serving as a barometer for the overall health of their surroundings. Changes in their growth rates, shell structure, or coloration can signal shifts in water quality, temperature, or the presence of pollutants, offering an early warning system of environmental stress or degradation. 

“Based on the wide range of ecological functions they perform, giant clams are unique among reef organisms and therefore deserve attention,” states Neo. “Whatever safeguards can be established will not only boost giant clam populations but, by extension, also benefit coral reefs.”

How heavy must be their shells to hold up the marine ecosystems they inhabit and forecast the state of our oceans?

Giant clams are threatened by rising sea temperatures similar to corals, expelling zooxanthellae in a phenomenon known as bleaching. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

A Less-Than-Bright Future 

Before becoming a highly prized global commodity, giant clams were weaved as part of a cultural fabric as communities celebrated their connection to the sea. Giant clams have been found fossilised in ancient tools during archeological excavations, and continue to play a part in ceremonial traditions and festivals. Near stilt houses topped with sago palm thatch in Pacific Island archipelagos, families farm giant clams in a circle off a nearby lagoon as “clam gardens”. Revered spiritually, their scoping shells are used as a cache for valuables or repositories for ancestral skulls. According to Barnett, in the legends of Palau, “the clam signifies power and it signifies persistence.”

At present, nine species of giant clam are labelled “vulnerable” or “lower risk” on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Red List. All species are listed under CITES Appendix II, meaning that, while they are not necessarily threatened with extinction, international trade must be legal, sustainable, and traceable to ensure their continued survival. These three prongs are, however, neither easy to confirm nor deny. Disparities in import and export figures reported by state parties already indicate unreliable reporting. As Neo suggests, “the CITES and IUCN data for giant clams are outdated and potentially misleading.”

After more recent reviews of giant clam stocks and their distribution, scientists are now calling for an update to its conservation status with grim news: Tridacna gigas is already locally extirpated in many areas of its native range, and other species are in substantial decline. 

There is growing evidence to support the overestimation of giant clam populations. Giant clams have been sold as curiosities and souvenirs and to decorate aquariums, predominantly in the US and Europe, while their abductor muscles, which hold the two halves of a bivalve together, became a valuable ingredient for gastronomic Asian cuisine, and their shells propping a burgeoning shell-carving industry in China and Japan, to be fashioned into statues and jewelry. 

As documented in a 2021 report by the Wildlife Justice Commission, authorities in the Philippines have made 14 seizures of giant clams since 2016, with some stockpiles weighing in excess of 120,000 tonnes. The report indicated a correlation with China’s national ban on ivory products in 2017, raising concerns that giant clams are the “new” ivory. As an alternative to elephant tusks and rhino horns, the ban may drive consumer demand underground, although no smuggling route has been identified. Even more complicated is the terse geopolitical background in which the illegal trade finds its moorings: disputed territorial waters and rising global tensions in the Pacific Ocean, and a continued race for resources. Marketed as “jade of the sea” and “white gold”, one thing is clear: giant clams, and their iridescent colours, hold both ecological and economic value, and the balance is currently tipped.

Scientists are also sounding the alarm about climate change and its irreversible impacts on the ocean, to which giant clams are not immune. Stressed by rising temperatures, giant clams may evict their algal partners in a phenomenon known as bleaching. Without their main food source, giant clams, like coral, turn from rainbow to a sickly white, leading to stunted growth and, at worst, death. Mass mortalities of giant clams have been reported as part of major bleaching events in 1997-1998 and again in 2015-2017, linked to unusually warm sea surface temperatures triggered by the El Niño Southern Oscillation. Their physiological responses and adaptive capacity remain a mystery.

The culmination of these threats, scientists fear, is a loss of biodiversity. It is not only a count of the number of different species, but the variety of genes within those species and the role they play within their ecosystem. In a study assessing functional traits and extinction risks of marine megafauna, giant clams are considered one of the top five species both functionally vital and most vulnerable, threatening its legacy as a symbol of power and persistence.

Giant clams are the world’s largest marine bivalves, with the largest species reaching over 120cm in shell length and weighing over 250 kilograms.

Clamming for Conservation

Coastal communities have long observed and monitored giant clams, adopting customary law and engaging in husbandry techniques for sustainable harvest. The importance of giant clams is nothing new; to them, giant clams have always been the focal point of coral reefs and the main indicator of reef health. Now, together with those communities, conservationists strive to restock coral reefs and advance the science of mariculture – the cultivation of marine organisms in their natural habitats – converging with traditional farming practices and clam gardens. By breeding and raising giant clams in controlled environments, conservationists hope that mariculture may offer an alternative to wild harvesting, replenishing depleted populations while also providing livelihood opportunities. 

The current approach to giant clam conservation appears significant, yet insufficient. Perhaps at this juncture, it is time again for giant clams to morph into something new: to shed its shell as jade and gold-glinted treasure and be recognised, as it always was, as an integral piece of the marine environment. This means not only understanding giant clams and their symbiotic algae partners or how they respond to different stressors but also addressing the interconnected nature of these challenges and committing to protecting the ocean as a whole, before giant clams do, in fact, become a myth.

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The first quarter of 2023 has been characterised by the black box of artificial intelligence (AI), inspiring awe and fear that we are now poised at the edge of some boundless technological revolution. Different models are out in droves; from applications in medical imaging for precancerous cells and in vehicles for autonomous navigation, to AlphaGo’s mastery of the centuries-old board game Go and ChatGPT’s disarray of education and industry through analysis and synthesis of human language. How might AI be used to face our imponderable and wicked problems, such as the illegal wildlife trade? 

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In March 2023, when customs officials at Hai Phong port – one of Vietnam’s busiest cargo ports – prised open a 6-metre-long metallic container declared as carrying peanuts, peanuts were nowhere to be found. Instead, inside the containers were hundreds of long, severed ivory tusks, stacked upon one another. 

This is the third occasion this year that the Hai Phong Customs Department has intercepted a shipment of illegal ivory. This time, the ivory weighed over 7,000 kilograms, the largest seizure at Hai Phong port. A rival to cocaine, a single kilogram of raw ivory commands a price tag ranging from US$100 to $2,500.

Ivory is only the tip of the tusk. Close neighbours, rhinos, are culled for their horns. When the international trade of elephants, rhinos, and their parts was made illegal, traffic not only continued unabated but pulled other species into its vortex; red keratin casques of helmeted hornbills and the pearl-tinted bivalve shells of giant clams are marketed as the “new” ivory, threatening both species with extinction. 

Beyond ivory, the global trade in thousands of other species from large mammals to plants and fungi for traditional medicines, exotic pets, and fashion has fuelled a rampant black market. United Nations Environment Programme and INTERPOL estimate the value of the global illegal wildlife trade up to US$20 billion annually. Its true scope, however, is difficult to gauge; the clandestine nature of the networks means that it remains a large and ever-elusive elephant in the room. 

Commonly bound with narcotics, arms, and human trafficking, the illegal wildlife trade networks rely on three main phases: Collection and harvest in source countries, trafficking networks for processing and transportation, and sale and purchase in destination countries. At each stage, there are many tricks of the trade to avoid detection and capture. 

The goods seized at Hai Phong are said to have been transshipped in Singapore, with unusual language and inaccurate input used in its declaration to disguise the consignment’s origin and routes. 

More often than not, contraband does not even need to be concealed; at customs ports, officials are frequently stumped by species and their source. Whether a transboundary species was harvested legally or illegally and in which origin country is next to impossible to determine. It is also – without sufficient manpower, knowledge, and a perceptibly keen eye – difficult to detect to which species of shark an unattached fin belongs, or which species have been processed into products like trinkets, garments, or medicines, in tablets or ground finely into powder. As illegal products are increasingly sold online on social media or e-commerce platforms, the proverbial game of cat and mouse is even further askew; sellers use code names or miswrite words and characters, hop between applications, and conceal their identity and location. Methods are constantly evolving, changing, and adapting.

As algorithms improve and AI intersects more regularly with daily life, many of those in the conservation field hold out hope that this juncture may provide entry points to embed AI within their efforts. 

“AI is being developed to automatically monitor and investigate high volumes of online data to effectively prevent and disrupt this trade,” wrote Prof. Payal Arora, a digital anthropologist and professor at Erasmus University Rotterdam focused on technology and social issues, in a collaborative paper. 

The roads between illegal wildlife trade and AI appear to be converging and crossing. To monitor wildlife and its harvest, a proliferation of AI cameras and sensors are being used to identify and track different species in their natural habitats. Archangel Imaging, a UK-based start-up, combines AI with cameras, motion detectors, and satellite communications to engineer the Argonaut. This new camera pings poaching activity to the nearest rangers, instead of daily foot patrol. The University of Southern California developed the Protection Assistant for Wildlife Security (PAWS) – promoted as a “game-theoretic decision-aid” that learns from the historic activity and topographical data and uses game theory to predict poaching hotspots and optimise patrol routes.

Further along the supply chain, AI algorithms have been trained to recognise features of illegal wildlife products and assist forensic scientists in analysing DNA, making it easier to detect them at border checkpoints and to identify the species and origin of the product. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the University of Vigo developed iSharkFin, a software that learns from dorsal and pectoral fin shapes to identify the species. In conjunction, a collaboration between Conservation International, the Singapore National Parks Board, Microsoft, and other partners resulted in the launch of the Fin Finder app, which is able to generate the shark species within a snap. In the marketplace, AI-powered tools are used to monitor social media and e-commerce platforms for keywords and images related to illegal wildlife trade activities via natural language processing and image recognition technology.

As things go in the wild, every action can have unknown and unpredictable consequences. While AI is currently nascent, its budding use and boundless potential have created an ethical and political minefield, with enduring dilemmas between open source and data privacy. This is exacerbated within the complex matrix of actors and activities in the illegal wildlife trade. 

“The accumulation of intelligence will only go as far as the funding allows”, wrote Arora, and the “exorbitant costs sit uncomfortably with the major resource scarcity in play.”

Public-private partnerships between donors and tech companies may simply use local communities, particularly in the Global South, as “testbeds for new technologies” and “with no clear steps for integration into the community”. Such constraints decouple AI from people, and compel “leapfrogging over the human to the technology.”

What this means, ultimately, is that AI is a tool for people, not against people. What is needed is a strategic approach toward data governance, security, and access. What is needed is a long-term investment in community-based networks. As to what we get, only time will tell.

You might also like: 7 Data-Based & Artificial Intelligence Projects To Help Fight Climate Change

The post AI in the Wild: Applications to Combat the Illegal Wildlife Trade appeared first on Earth.Org.

Where the Internet installed a powerful circuit with highly conductive pathways for the sale and purchase of illegal wildlife, deep learning models show promise to insulate and inhibit the passage of trade. In March 2023, an international collaboration developed the first test case study using deep neural networks to identify species online, with the potential to interrupt pangolin trade from source to load.

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It starts with images of pangolins. Eight different species across their native range: south of the Sahara, arboreal white or black-bellied pangolins climb and clasp on trees, while terrestrial giant ground pangolins scuttle across forest-savannah mosaics. Further east, Chinese pangolins furrow in underground burrows and emerge at night to feed and forage in bamboo and broadleaved forests. Indian pangolins on the rainforest canopy harvest ants attracted by fruit and flowers. Then there are images of pangolins rolled up in defence, protruding their scales to ward against predators many times their size. Or pangolins in crates and cages, alive or dead, obtained through seizures, or to be unloaded in wet markets. Pangolins are stripped of their pelts, and keratin scales are collected in jute bags. Each of these images is collated, sorted, annotated, and classified manually according to its content: “pangolins” or “no pangolins”, “pangolin entirely” or “pangolin parts”. 

Using these images and textual classifications, Ana Sofia Cardoso – a researcher at the Research Centre in Biodiversity and Genetic Resources in Portugal – and her collaborators created a training dataset for deep learning models to identify pangolin species and flag illegal online trade instances. 

When the world shut down for Covid19, pangolins became an emblem of the illegal wildlife trade. Uplisted from Appendix II to Appendix I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) in 2017, all commercial trade in the species is strictly prohibited. However, according to a recent report by the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC) – a multinational network where experts and civil society actors congregate to combat organised crime – pangolins are one of the most highly trafficked species and are increasingly sold in overlooked places: online markets. 

Traders migrate from physical markets towards virtual platforms, which provide an accessible, cost-effective, and largely unregulated space. In this digital marketplace, high demand and low barriers to entry incentivise illicit and unsustainable harvest of the species. 

Making use of the vast and highly conductive grid between billions of users on social media applications like Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Instagram and e-commerce platforms, sellers showcase pangolin products, connect to new buyers and rapidly change platforms when detected by enforcement agencies. The dark web integrates further layers of anonymity and untraceability on the board, encrypting the location and identity of users and keeping communications confidential. 

To explore a potential tool both for scientific research and for law enforcement, the authors of the study used freely available deep learning models for two primary tasks – “classification”, which assigns a label or category to an input image, and “object detection”, which extends beyond simple identification but localises the object in its context– to make efficient the identification, monitoring and ultimately enforcement of traded species and its derivative parts from online content. 

Like the way neurons and synapses signal and spark in the human brain, nodes and layers enable deep learning models to assimilate inputs and produce outputs. These artificial neural networks, where data is processed in manifold layers, are able to analyse texts, messages, and posts, identify content and classify images advertised online. What characterises deep learning is the ability to learn and improve from experience, automatically and without human intervention, identifying increasingly abstract representations of data from the new and the unseen.

The authors developed deep learning models with “feature visualization”, enabling the detection of not only wild, natural environments in which pangolins are located as well as their non-natural surroundings. 

The neural networks showed high performance, both for classification and for object detection, being able to flag over 90% of potential instances of pangolin trade over the trained image set and accurately determine whole pangolins or derivative parts, as well as individuals in their habitats or in market settings. 

There are, of course, some limitations. Sites on the dark web remain impervious from common search engines, and deep learning models will need to be further calibrated to improve their readings of low-resolution and poor-quality images. The true obstacle lies in the ignition: substantial human verification is needed of the initial data set, which requires considerable effort and may not be replicable at every species level. Nevertheless, the preliminary results show “the immense potential” of deep learning. 

“We hope to contribute towards the development of a more efficient, low cost and less time-consuming tool,” the authors state. 

The myriad of connectors in the digital wildlife trade network may well be better isolated and insulated in the face of an expanding field of digital conservation. However, as the world forays deeper into automated intelligence and learning, many critical questions arise in a conservation field already fraught with tensions: How will data collection and storage be governed, and what is the impact on the right to privacy? How will deep learning relate to and impact drivers, motivations, and other complexities behind the illegal wildlife trade? 

Addressing how deep learning may serve or burden the wider socioeconomic and cultural system in which the illegal wildlife trade operates will be the first step towards shorting the circuit.

Featured image: Wikimedia Commons.

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The post Ending the Illegal Pangolin Trade: A Case Study appeared first on Earth.Org.