Internship week 1: STEP OUTSIDE YOUR COMFORT ZONE

Karen Fuentes
Jul 9
2 min read

After 11 years working in the energy industry and no science background, I decided to take the

leap and step into the ocean conservation world by joining Manta Caribbean Project as a

volunteer.

The first week has already been transformative and certainly a humbling experience.

We learned that being an ocean conservationist is not easy: funding is shrinking and increasingly challenging to access, tools are expensive and the cost to run field research is high, forget about having a steady salary and a glamorous life.

However, protecting the ocean and its creatures is both urgent and essential. It is a delight to witness the passion and dedication of Karen and her team (which is mostly female and from local fishermen families).

Knowing that you are contributing to such a meaningful purpose you deeply believe in and at your own terms, brings such joy and happiness that nothing else can.

We started off the week by learning about manta rays anatomy, biology and behaviour, as well as about field data collection and protocols, which also involved corals, microplastics and any

possible detail on environmental conditions.

As Karen always says, every information and detail

can help us learn something more, for example, correlating manta presence or absence with

certain sea conditions. It is exciting to contribute to this aspect, although it requires an incredible level of rigor I am not used to, but I am grateful to learn. A missed or wrong information can potentially spoil a full day of work and, as I realised, if it seems too easy, you are probably doing something wrong.

Then we familiarised ourselves with the tools and materials that we were going to use on the field trip, discovering that being creative on how to use common objects for research ppurposesis a very precious skill to have (strainers and tweezers can become your best friends).

Field day finally came and we were blessed with a huge amount of manta sightings and breachings(yes, massive mantas here jump out of the water! Mind blowing to experience). We realised how hard it is to get a manta ID: each manta has a different personality and they lead

the interaction, the visibility was terrible (but that means that water was super rich in nutrients, making mantas happy :) ) and diving to take a video of the bottom part, where the unique spots that allow to identify individuals are located, not for the unfit and faint hearted.

Spending the day in marine protected areas, where regular boats have no access to, was a very rewarding and precious experience, as it was finding out that at least 2 of the mantas we spotted were not in the database yet! With the samples collected we also got proof that “there is more than meets the eye” with an incredible amount of plankton, zooplankton, little eggs and sadly also microplastics, such as nylon fibres and fragments of paint.

This first week was incredible and I can't wait to see what the coming ones hold. Thanks to Karen for teaching us with grace, kindness and firmness, I couldn’t recommend this experience more!