Widespread Use of Migratory Megafauna for Aquatic Wild Meat in the Tropics and Subtropics

Wild animals are captured or taken opportunistically, and the meat, body parts, and/or eggs are consumed for local subsistence or used for traditional purposes to some extent across most of the world, particularly in the tropics and subtropics. The consumption of aquatic animals is widespread, in some places has been sustained for millennia, and can be an important source of nutrition, income, and cultural identity to communities. Yet, economic opportunities to exploit wildlife at higher levels have led to unsustainable exploitation of some species. In the literature, there has been limited focus on the exploitation of aquatic non-fish animals for food and other purposes. Understanding the scope and potential threat of aquatic wild meat exploitation is an important first step toward appropriate inclusion on the international policy and conservation management agenda. Here, we conduct a review of the literature, and present an overview of the contemporary use of aquatic megafauna (cetaceans, sirenians, chelonians, and crocodylians) in the global tropics and subtropics, for species listed on the Appendices of the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS). We find that consumption of aquatic megafauna is widespread in coastal regions, although to varying degrees, and that some species are likely to be at risk from overexploitation, particularly riverine megafauna. Finally, we provide recommendations for CMS in the context of the mandate of the Aquatic Wild Meat Working Group.Additional co-authors: Jeffrey W. Lang, Sigrid Lüber, Charlie Manolis, Grahame J. W. Webb and Lindsay Porte

Widespread use of migratory megafauna for aquatic wild meat in the tropics and subtropics

Wild animals are captured or taken opportunistically, and the meat, body parts, and/or eggs are consumed for local subsistence or used for traditional purposes to some extent across most of the world, particularly in the tropics and subtropics. The consumption of aquatic animals is widespread, in some places has been sustained for millennia, and can be an important source of nutrition, income, and cultural identity to communities. Yet, economic opportunities to exploit wildlife at higher levels have led to unsustainable exploitation of some species. In the literature, there has been limited focus on the exploitation of aquatic non-fish animals for food and other purposes. Understanding the scope and potential threat of aquatic wild meat exploitation is an important first step toward appropriate inclusion on the international policy and conservation management agenda. Here, we conduct a review of the literature, and present an overview of the contemporary use of aquatic megafauna (cetaceans, sirenians, chelonians, and crocodylians) in the global tropics and subtropics, for species listed on the Appendices of the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS). We find that consumption of aquatic megafauna is widespread in coastal regions, although to varying degrees, and that some species are likely to be at risk from overexploitation, particularly riverine megafauna. Finally, we provide recommendations for CMS in the context of the mandate of the Aquatic Wild Meat Working Group

BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these capabilities have led to widespread adoption, most LLMs are developed by resource-rich organizations and are frequently kept from the public. As a step towards democratizing this powerful technology, we present BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open-access language model designed and built thanks to a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. BLOOM is a decoder-only Transformer language model that was trained on the ROOTS corpus, a dataset comprising hundreds of sources in 46 natural and 13 programming languages (59 in total). We find that BLOOM achieves competitive performance on a wide variety of benchmarks, with stronger results after undergoing multitask prompted finetuning. To facilitate future research and applications using LLMs, we publicly release our models and code under the Responsible AI License

Margarita de Sossa, Sixteenth-Century Puebla de los Ángeles, New Spain (Mexico)

Margarita de Sossa’s freedom journey was defiant and entrepreneurial. In her early twenties, still enslaved in Portugal, she took possession of her body; after refusing to endure her owner’s sexual demands, he sold her, and she was transported to Mexico. There, she purchased her freedom with money earned as a healer and then conducted an enviable business as an innkeeper. Sossa’s biography provides striking insights into how she conceptualized freedom in terms that included – but was not limited to – legal manumission. Her transatlantic biography offers a rare insight into the life of a free black woman (and former slave) in late sixteenth-century Puebla, who sought to establish various degrees of freedom for herself. Whether she was refusing to acquiesce to an abusive owner, embracing entrepreneurship, marrying, purchasing her own slave property, or later using the courts to petition for divorce. Sossa continued to advocate on her own behalf. Her biography shows that obtaining legal manumission was not always equivalent to independence and autonomy, particularly if married to an abusive husband, or if financial successes inspired the envy of neighbors

Conclusion

La poésie est universelle, la poésie est au-delà des frontières et des patries, petites ou grandes, comme il vient d’être dit. Quand on parle de Du Bellay comme on l’a fait cet après-midi, on ressent chez lui cette identité d’une France profonde qu’il exprime si bien en Italie et ailleurs, dans ses retours de voyage en Méditerranée. On distingue aussi, dans les littératures francophones, ces héritages, ces cheminements et ces allées et venues entre les poètes de Rochefort et les poètes franco..

Introduction

À côté de l’emploi courant de la langue et du langage, nous allons voir quel usage de cette langue il peut être fait par des gens qui l’aiment, la triturent, la détruisent, et sont parfois fautifs, à l’intérieur même de cette langue, parce qu’ils ont un certain nombre d’aspirations, de désirs, d’angoisses et d’espérances à transmettre à partir d’une langue qu’il leur est difficile de maîtriser, de dominer. Pourquoi ? Parce qu’un poète, c’est d’abord quelqu’un qui a du mal à sa langue, comme i..

Zero Group Velocity and backward Lamb modes

International audienceLaser ultrasonics techniques are very useful to investigate Lamb modes in plates. In this talk, the remarkable properties of zero group velocity (ZGV) and backward Lamb modes will be discussed and illustrated through measurements done with nanoseconds laser ultrasonics. These modes originate from the repulsion between two dispersion branches having close cut off frequencies, corresponding to a longitudinal and a transverse thickness mode of the same symmetry. The lowest branch exhibits a minimum corresponding to the ZGV mode and a negative slope associated to backward propagation. The frequency spectrum of the plate elastic response to a local impact is entirely dominated by ZGV resonances and for isotropic plates the set of resonance frequencies provides an accurate measurement of the local Poisson's ratio. When either the transverse or the longitudinal acoustic velocity is known, plate thickness can be precisely determined. Backward modes, having negative phase velocities, exist in the vicinity of a ZGV mode. It will be shown that mode conversion from the S2 forward mode to the S2b backward mode can be achieved at a plate thickness change. Then, negative refraction and focusing can be obtained with a simple flat lens