SPECIES PROTECTION

Daniel Fernando, a marine biologist and associate director of the Manta Trust, a Britain-based charity, has been working to change fisheries management policies in places like Sri Lanka, India, the Philippines and Malaysia to protect manta rays and their smaller cousins, the mobula. He used an $8,000 grant from the New England Aquarium to conduct an additional year of fish market research - following the rays from sea to customer - to better understand how and why they were being caught and sold. Fernando, also a founder of Blue Resources, a marine research and conservation organization based in Sri Lanka, hopes to discourage the manta’s use in Chinese medicine, and to encourage U.S. consumers to demand that the tuna they eat is fished by hand, rather than by nets that also trap rays. Hand-fishing is more expensive than deploying nets, Fernando concedes, but “you have to make a decision.” He added, “Do you want cheap tuna that’s driving a species out of existence?” Fishermen’s nets were also a point of concern for a conservation effort in Chile. In small fishing villages there, a $6,000 aquarium grant helped a nonprofit group install collection bins for torn nets that would probably have been thrown into the sea. The charity, run by the founders of Bureo Skateboards, a California-based company, recycles the nylon nets to produce skateboards shaped like minnows. The villages receive some money back for projects. The grant was out of the ordinary for the aquarium, because it focused on a novel engineering solution to marine debris rather than on a particular species or habitat. But “having the structure we do and our willingness to take chances gives us great flexibility,” Stephenson said. The project is now self-sustaining. Ben Kneppers, a Bureo founder, said he hoped the story of the skateboards might inspire the next generation of marine conservationists, by showing young people “that there are solutions to what seem to be overwhelming problems. ” (© 2015 New York Times News Service)