Latest / How To Protect The Ocean / Nearly 2,000 Volunteers Just Answered the Ocean's Biggest Question

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Nearly 2,000 Volunteers Just Answered the Ocean's Biggest Question · How To Protect The Ocean

• 0:00
  For more than 10 years, almost 2,000 people have been walking
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  California beaches with a clipboard.
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  They're not looking for shells.
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  They're not looking for lost dogs.
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  They're counting strangers.
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  Every surfer, every kid in a tide pool, every person with a
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  fishing rod, every kayak, all of it tallied one beach walk at a time.
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  And here's the strange part.
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  The pile of clipboard data, more than a million little tally marks, just
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  answered a question that scientists have argued about for decades.
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  Do marine protected areas actually work?
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  Not just on paper, in the real world with real people.
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  Today, we are going to walk one of those beaches with them, and
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  we're going to find out what all of that counting revealed.
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  You're listening to the How to Protect the Ocean podcast, and I'm Andrew Lewin.
• 0:45
  This is the show where we take one ocean story a day and turn it
• 0:49
  into something you can actually do every weekday, Monday to Friday.
• 0:54
  If this is your thing, do me a favor, hit that follow button right now
• 0:57
  wherever you're listening to this.
• 0:58
  And it is the single easiest way to help this show keep going.
• 1:02
  Then come back, and let's get into it.
• 1:04
  And of course, if you wanna support the show, you can go
• 1:07
  to speakupforblue.com/patreon.
• 1:10
  That's speakupforblue.com/patreon.
• 1:14
  So let's start with the question underneath the whole episode.
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  When you hear the words marine protected area, what do you picture?
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  Probably a line on a map, a stretch of coast where the rules are different.
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  Maybe no fishing, maybe not taking anything at all.
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  Okay, but a line on the map does not protect anything by itself.
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  A rule only matters if people follow it, and that raises a
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  question almost nobody asks.
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  Who is actually checking?
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  Who is standing on that beach day after day, seeing whether people obey the line?
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  And if we did check, what would we find?
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  Would we find a quiet compliance, or would we find that protected is just a word
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  we put on a sign and hope for the best?
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  For most of the California coast, for most of history, the honest
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  answer was nobody really knows.
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  Nobody was counting.
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  Until a group of volunteers decided to change that.
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  Here's the scene.
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  It was a bright Friday morning on the California coast.
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  A volunteer parks, grabs a data sheet and a pair of binoculars, and walks down to
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  a fixed starting point on the sand, the same starting point every single time.
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  Then they begin to walk a set path along the shore.
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  As they go, they count.
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  Not everything at once.
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  They count in categories: people swimming, people surfing, people walking
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  dogs, people tide pooling, people fishing from the rocks, boats offshore.
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  They note the weather.
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  They note the tide.
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  They write down the time of day.
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  It sounds pretty simple.
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  It sounds almost too simple to matter.
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  But now multiply it.
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  This is a statewide program called MPA Watch.
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  It runs through a network of about a dozen local organizations from
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  near the Oregon border all the way down to the Mexican border.
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  And when researchers pulled the archive together for this new
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  study, the numbers were staggering.
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  Almost two thousand volunteers, more than thirty thousand separate beach
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  surveys, over one hundred sites up and down the coast, both inside
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  protected areas and outside them.
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  And more than 1.2 human individual activities all counted by
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  hand between 2012 and 2020.
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  Let that sink in.
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  1.2 million tally marks made by regular people on their own time because they
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  cared about the water in front of them.
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  And it is not always calm work.
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  A reporter recently joined one of these teams on a boat survey
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  off La Jolla near San Diego.
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  On that single trip, the crew spotted three vessels that appeared to be
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  fishing illegally inside a no-take zone.
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  They logged the locations by radar and sent them straight
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  to state wildlife authorities.
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  The statewide coordinator put it plainly, "This program is basically California's
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  only way to know what human activity is actually happening on the beach."
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  Those are the eyes on the coast.
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  Now, what did all those eyes see?
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  Here's where it gets really good.
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  The researchers did not just add up the tally marks.
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  Volunteer data is actually pretty messy.
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  People survey at different times, in different weather, with different skills.
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  So the team used careful statistical models to strip out the noise.
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  They controlled for the tide, the season, the day of the week, the
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  weather, the type of beach, all of it.
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  They wanted the real signal, not just the busy weekends.
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  And when the signal came through, it told a clear story.
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  Three parts.
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  First finding.
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  The first finding inside the strictest protected areas, the no-take zones where
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  you are not supposed to remove anything, the amount of fishing and collecting
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  was significantly lower than outside.
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  Compliance, in other words, was pretty high.
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  Across the whole state, the vast majority of what people were
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  doing broke no rules at all.
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  The line of the map was mostly being respected.
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  The second finding, and this one matters just as much, protection
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  did not ruin anyone's fun.
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  People were swimming, surfing, diving, and walking the beach inside protected areas
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  at the same rate as everywhere else.
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  There was no measurable drop in recreation.
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  So the fear you sometimes hear that protecting the ocean means
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  locking people out of it, the data simply didn't support that.
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  You protect the fish, and people still get their beach day, both things at once.
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  And the third finding, the coast is overwhelmingly a place people
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  go to enjoy, not to extract.
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  Take one busy Southern California beach the study modeled.
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  On one nice day, the model predicted around four hundred
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  and fifty people out there.
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  And of all those people, only a small handful, fewer than five,
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  were there to take anything at all.
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  Everyone else was just living their life next to the sea.
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  So put those three things together.
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  People are mostly following the rules.
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  Protection is not costing our recreation, and extraction is
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  the exception, not the norm.
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  That is a genuinely hopeful picture, and we only know it because somebody counted.
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  This is why a quick pause here.
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  If you are finding this useful, the best thing you can do right
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  now is share this episode with one person who loves the ocean.
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  Just one.
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  That is how this show grows, and it costs you nothing.
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  Okay, because there's one more layer here, and it is the layer
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  that ties everything together.
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  You might be thinking, fine, but counting people is not counting fish.
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  How do we know the protection actually is helping the
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  ocean, not just the beachgoers?
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  That's a fair question, and this is where the human data meets the underwater data.
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  For years, separate teams of scientists have been diving California's
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  protected reefs, measuring the fish.
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  In twenty twenty-two, the state pulled ten years of that
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  work together in a big review.
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  The result across the network, fish inside the protected areas
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  were more abundant, larger, and greater in total mass than fish in
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  comparable areas open to fishing.
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  The effect was strongest exactly where you would expect, in places under heavy
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  fishing pressure and in the larger, older reserves that had no time to recover.
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  Now, why does that recovery happen?
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  Because people leave fish alone, which brings us right back to the clipboards.
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  Think of it this way.
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  The dive surveys tell you what is happening underwater.
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  The beach counts tell you why.
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  And if the fish are coming back, the human data can show you that
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  it is because people are actually honoring the no-take zones.
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  One data set without the other is only half the story.
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  Together, they close the loop.
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  And when protection is real and enforced, the payoff can be spectacular.
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  There's a famous example just south of California in Mexico
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  a place called Cabo Pulmo.
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  Local families fought to turn their overfished reef into a
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  strictly protected no-take park and then actually defended it.
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  Within about a decade, the total mass of fish on the reef grew more than
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  four times over a jump of roughly four hundred and sixty percent.
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  Big predators, the sharks and groupers, came roaring back.
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  It became one of the most dramatic ocean recoveries ever measured.
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  The difference is not magic.
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  It's enforcement and a community that showed up.
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  That is the thread running through this entire episode.
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  Protection on paper does nothing.
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  Protection that people believe in and follow and watch
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  over brings the ocean back.
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  And the only reason we can prove people are following it at the scale
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  of an entire coastline is that a couple of thousand volunteers kept
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  walking the beach and counting.
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  So here is the big idea I want you to walk away with.
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  We tend to think ocean recovery is something that happens far away, done by
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  experts in wetsuits and research boats.
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  And that work is real, and it does matter.
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  But this study is a reminder that a huge piece of it is because of
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  just ordinary people, people with a clipboard and a free morning doing
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  something small over and over for years.
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  That patience became one point two million data points, and those
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  data points became proof, proof that California's ocean protections are
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  working and that people are largely respecting them, and that we did not
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  have to give up the coast to protect it.
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  The ocean is not only saved by heroes, it is saved by people who just show
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  up, which means you can be one of them.
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  Let me give you a few real options here.
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  Nothing here is going to single-handedly save the ocean, and
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  I am not gonna pretend otherwise.
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  Each one is a genuine, honest contribution.
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  One, if you are anywhere near the California coast, you can literally
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  do what this episode is all about.
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  MPA watch trains everyday volunteers to walk these surveys.
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  You do not need a science degree.
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  Go to mpawatch.org and find a program nearest you.
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  A few surveys a month at your own pace around the tides.
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  That's the whole commitment.
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  Two, wherever you live, learn the local rules before you go.
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  Find out where the nearest protected area is and what it actually allows.
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  Some zones let you fish, some let you take nothing.
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  Knowing the line and respecting it is one of the most direct things that you can do.
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  And third, the beach walk classic.
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  Grab three pieces of trash every time you leave the coast.
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  Volunteers in this very program call it the three of the sea.
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  It is small, but it adds up Four, if you see something that looks
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  like poaching inside a protected zone, you do not confront anyone.
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  You report it.
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  In California, that goes to the Department of Fish and Wildlife tip line.
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  Like those volunteers off La Jolla, your job is just to be a witness.
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  Collecting the observation is enough.
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  And five, share what you learned today.
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  The finding that protection works and that it works without shutting people
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  out is exactly the kind of thing people need to hear about right now.
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  So pass it on.
• 10:26
  That's it for today's episode.
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  If you got something out of it, hit that follow button so you don't miss
• 10:30
  tomorrow's story, and your feed automatically downloads it and updates
• 10:34
  you on what's happening in the ocean.
• 10:36
  And to be honest, like, I really just appreciate you listening each and
• 10:39
  every day, each and every weekday that I publish, Monday to Friday.
• 10:42
  It's something that I really enjoy.
• 10:43
  It's kept me connected to the ocean.
• 10:45
  I'm a science communicator who works for a company called Pisces Oceans, and
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  I just love doing this kind of stuff.
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  This is something that I will always do, and this is episode 1978.
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  1,978. It was actually the year I was born, in 1978.
• 10:57
  Yeah, I'm old.
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  It's okay.
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  But I love this stuff.
• 10:59
  I really love the fact that you're listening.
• 11:01
  If you have any suggestions on this type of format that I'm
• 11:03
  doing, 'cause it's a little bit different than I've done before, I
• 11:05
  would love to hear your thoughts.
• 11:07
  Please let me know.
• 11:08
  You can DM me on TikTok, on Facebook, on Instagram, whichever one you prefer.
• 11:12
  Or you can go to speakupforblue.com/patreon,
• 11:16
  and you can support the show if you really love it that much.
• 11:19
  I appreciate you listening.
• 11:21
  This has been another exciting episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast.
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  I'm your host, Andrew Lewin.
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  Have a great day.
• 11:26
  We'll talk to you next time, and happy conservation.