The Ocean Conservationist - Issue10

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010

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winter

2025

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habitats

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advocacy

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experiences

Editor’s Welcome As we come to the end of 2025, I am pleased to bring you another issue of the Ocean Conservationist, which reflects lots of exciting work that is happening both above and below the Ocean’s surface.

Editor: Catherine Ansell

Opening with a behind-the-scenes look at one of the most creative roles in our organisation, our Multimedia Content Officer shares what it’s like to capture stories, science and conservation through her lens each day.

From there, we dive into an impressive scientific milestone, as one of our Support Biologists tells us about a species of jellyfish that he has successfully cultured for the first time ever at our Conservation Aquarium.

Our Blue Meadows Engagement Officer, Eden, reflects on the UK Seagrass Symposium and the expanding national effort to protect and restore seagrass meadows, and we also bring you updates on the upgrades we have made to our National Seagrass Nursery.

We continue to connect people with the Ocean through community and education. Read all about our biggest and most inclusive STEMFest event yet and find out more about our newest intergenerational project, The Ocean’s Voice. On a global scale, we introduce our work on the Ocean & Society Survey, an ambitious research initiative exploring how people understand and engage with the Ocean around the world.

As always, thank you for supporting us as we work towards a future with a healthy, thriving Ocean.

Catherine Ansell, Ocean Conservation Trust.

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Contact us info@oceanconservationtrust.org 01752 717294 @OceanConservationTrust @OceanConservationTrust Ocean Conservation Trust and b Inspiring a global movement to promote and encourage a wave of positive behaviour towards our Ocean. Charity Number 1032491.

Contents 04.

A day in the life of a Multimedia Content Officer Our Multimedia Content Officer, Jess, shares insights into what a day in the life of her creative job is like.

08.

Special species of jellyfish cultured in our Centre of Ocean Excellence for the first time ever!

We spoke to Support Biologist, Zach Jenkins, about his work culturing jellyfish behind the scenes at the National Marine Aquarium.

11.

Reflections from the 2025 UK Seagrass Symposium Eden, our Blue Meadows Engagement Officer, shares the details from the UKSS, which brings together seagrass conservation efforts across the UK.

14.

The National Seagrass Nursery We talk about the major upgrades to our seagrass nursery site, and what seagrass conservation activities are happening there at the moment.

16.

Celebrating our biggest and most inclusive STEMFest yet!

Our Learning Team tells us about their annual STEMFest event.

Loved by students and teachers alike, 2025 was the biggest one yet!

19.

The Ocean’s Voice Find out about our new intergenerational project that aims to connect generations together who love the Ocean.

20.

A global research initiative: The Ocean and Society Survey Find out more about the global research initiative to understand people’s knowledge, feelings and behaviours towards the Ocean.

22.

Fundraise for the Ocean Fundraising ideas to support our vision of a healthy, thriving Ocean.

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A day in the life of a Multimedia Content Officer We spoke to our Multimedia Content Officer, Jess, about what a day in the life of a person creating digital content for an Ocean conservation charity and its Conservation Aquarium is like.

Some of my favourite days are spent out on the water with our seagrass team, filming and photographing their work.

I also often follow around our animal husbandry team for animal moves or feeds, getting to see all of our amazing animal residents up close!

What does a typical day in the life of a Multimedia Content Officer look like?

After capturing the content, there’s a LOT of postproduction work I have to do. For videos, I’ll edit them differently depending on the platform they’re intended to be published on; this can take anywhere from hours to days, depending on the project.

Despite what most people may think, I do spend most of my days at my desk. It’s only when other teams have activities happening that I go out to capture what they’re doing.

Our photos are also all edited, so they look lovely, bright and colourful and ready to use across our various platforms, such as this very magazine.

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How did you get into your job/field of work?

What are the main challenges of your job?

Social media and content creation isn’t what every child dreams of doing when they grow up, but I somehow accidentally fell into it. When I was younger, I ran my own YouTube channel, which is what first introduced me to the world of social media content creation. After that, I decided to study Film and Television Production at the University of Plymouth, with the intention of getting into the creative industry.

The main challenge is finding out what is going on! There’s always a million things happening at the OCT, and many people don’t quite realise just how interesting their job is, as it’s the norm for them. Part of my job is to find the stories happening within our organisation, and share them as little bite-sized social media posts, be that as videos or as stills.

I have always loved animals and the natural world; if I were a little better at biology at school, I probably would’ve gone down the animal biologist path. So, when I saw that there was a position available at the OCT that combined my love of cameras and animals, I thought it was too good to be true. Now I get to work with both animals and cameras, win-win!

When it comes to conservation and social media, unfortunately, just posting information online isn’t enough to get people to care about it. That’s why we tend to use storytelling a lot in our content. Our team is made up of hundreds of passionate people, but unfortunately, not everyone will get the chance to meet these people face to face as I have. By sharing these stories online, we hope to make people understand why we do what we do!

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How do you successfully create engagement when fish aren’t always thought of as cute?

That’s a big challenge! Unless people are already obsessed with the Ocean and all its inhabitants, it can be REALLY difficult to make people emotionally invest in fish and marine species. They lack an emotional empathy gap compared to many mammal species, and often don’t trigger that same emotional response. So one of the most challenging things I have to do is to find ways to tell stories that make people care about these marine species and their habitats.

The internet is also saturated with content, so getting our content to stand out is a real challenge.

I like to use a combination of strong visual imagery, and both visual and verbal hooks to get people to stop scrolling and engage with our content.

As I said above, our team is made up of hundreds of people who live and breathe the Ocean, so letting these people tell their stories online helps audiences connect with our message!

What are your top 3 species in the National Marine Aquarium to work with?

1.

I LOVE the pollock, most people overlook them, but they’re a photographer’s dream! They enjoy swimming at eye level in their exhibit, and also swim VERY slowly, giving me lots of time to capture them swimming about.

They’re also super cute.

2.

The lionfish are effortlessly stunning, it’s near impossible to get a bad image of them. They also have the very useful habit of swimming near the front of their exhibit, so they’re super easy to get close-ups of!

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Friday the turtle, he’s the only reptile we have at the aquarium and a fan favourite for sure. He can be tricky to capture because he doesn’t always swim at the right level in the water column, but depending on what colour outfit you’re wearing, he’ll quite often swim down and say hello. I’ve found he’s particularly fond of a particular green skirt I own, I think he thinks it looks like lettuce. I don’t love it when he splashes me and my not so waterproof camera at the top of the exhibit though…

What is your biggest achievement as Multimedia Content Officer at the OCT?

What is the best thing you have captured on camera, whether that be photo or video?

Having my footage featured in our BBC TV Documentary ‘Secrets of the Aquarium’ in 2023, and also having my name in the credits of the programme! Seeing my name on national television was a bit surreal, to say the least.

I don’t think I can choose, but the top few moments were filming a nurse shark receive an ultrasound, capturing a Banggaii cardinalfish mouth brood its babies (this photo then went on to win runner up in the BIAZA photography competition!) and capturing pictures of Steve Backshall whilst he was visiting the Aquarium for filming, there may have been a bit of fan girling!

What is your top tip to protect the Ocean?

Consume less! We are constantly being told to buy buy buy! Be that the latest fashionable clothing item or the newest trendy keychain. In my early twenties, I spent so much money on useless stuff, especially clothing. Turns out thinking about how each purchase will affect the natural world helps both your purse and your impact on the Ocean.

Buy second-hand when you can. Almost everything I buy is now second-hand, charity shops hate to see me coming!

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Special species of jellyfish in our Centre of Ocean Exc for the first time ever!

Support Biologist, Zach Jenkins, tells us all about a special species of jellyfish that he is culturing behind the scenes in the National Marine Aquarium’s specialist facility, Ocean Lab.

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cultured cellence

They have no brain, no heart, and no blood. They capture their prey with long, extending arms laden with deadly stinging cells, and they glide through their watery environment by pulsating their entire body.

You would be forgiven for thinking I am describing an alien life form. In fact, I am describing one of the most ancient animals on our planet, the jellyfish! These beautiful, elegant creatures are often in the limelight due to the detriment they cause to humans, such as stinging beach visitors and clogging fishing nets. But, jellyfish also play an important role in Ocean ecosystems, in particular providing habitats to juvenile fish, as food for turtles and sunfish, and transporting carbon to the Ocean floor. At the National Marine Aquarium (NMA), our goal is to connect visitors to the Ocean. We want to show you that jellyfish are not scary or a nuisance and instead are a magnificent and integral group of marine organisms.

Jellyfish have a complex life cycle composed of stages that look and act very different from each other. The adults, called medusae, are probably the life stage you are most familiar with. They can be present in large ‘blooms’ during the summer and some species have a painful sting, so stay clear of them when swimming in the sea. Males and females produce planula larvae which settle on a hard surface and transform into an anemone-like polyp.

Under the right conditions, these polyps bud off tiny baby jellyfish called ephyra, which grow over the spring into the adult medusae.

Our Biologists are able to facilitate this process at the NMA, utilising specific tanks, diets, and water conditions to ensure healthy development into adults, which you will be able to see in action if you look into our Ocean Lab. Individuals cultured are displayed in our Ocean Drifters habitat. As a conservation aquarium, we opt to leave the Ocean alone as much as possible, so culturing jellyfish in captivity means we do not have to take individuals from the wild. Collection trips can be difficult and expensive, and wild-caught medusae have a shorter lifespan than medusae grown in captivity and can become damaged in transit. Behind the scenes, we have been working hard growing a jellyfish you probably haven’t seen in an aquarium before...

The compass jellyfish! They are one of six ‘true’ jellyfish found along the British coastline and are easily identifiable from the brown, V-shaped colouration on their bell and long, frilly oral arms. You will frequently find them when swimming in the sea during summer but they have historically been very difficult to grow in aquariums due to their diverse diet and fragile early life stages. However, here at the National Marine Aquarium, we have been successful in growing compass jellyfish from the polyp to medusa stage, representing one of the first documented examples ever! Our largest individual was 6 cm wide and even had the distinctive adult colouration. So, what was the secret to our success?

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Our research identified that compass jellyfish ephyrae grew the best when fed blended mussels and copepods (free-swimming crustaceans), enjoying fish eggs too as they grew larger. These smaller jellyfish were maintained in spherical tanks called biorbs and then moved onto special circular tanks called planktonkreisels, which create a continuous flow that suspends the jellyfish in the water column as if they were in the Ocean.

Adults had a larger appetite consisting of mussels, fish eggs, krill, blended prawns, and even ephyrae of other jellyfish species!

Interestingly, they rejected brine shrimp, which is what we use to feed all the other jellyfish species at the NMA. This is one of the reasons compass jellyfish have been so difficult to grow in aquariums so far.

Selecting the optimum water conditions for the jellyfish has been an important part of this project, because they themselves are ~95% water! Perfect temperature, salinity, pH, nutrient and oxygen concentrations are essential for ‘happy’ medusae which we identified through our personal observations, data from the natural range of the species, and data from other more widely cultured jellyfish species. Future research at the NMA will refine these husbandry techniques and identify more food items necessary to develop our relatively small medusae to a size large enough to display. Being able to culture this species is very important as it will allow visitors to observe this wonderful, local jellyfish closely and connect with the British seas in a new way. Additionally, it will give scientists the opportunity to understand the poorly studied biology and ecology of the compass jellyfish in more detail.

I conducted this project as part of my university placement with the help of James Barnett and many other amazing Biologists. Be sure to keep an eye out for the compass jellyfish in our Ocean Drifters habitat in the future!

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Reflections from the 2025 UK Seagrass Symposium In November, our Ocean Habitat Restoration team assembled in full to head to the second UK Seagrass Symposium. After hosting the inaugural UK Seagrass Symposium back in 2023, we were delighted to pass the baton over to Project Seagrass to host this year’s event in Cardiff Bay. It was inspiring to see how the seagrass community has grown and was a great opportunity to reconnect with peers and share progress as we all continue protecting and restoring seagrass across the UK. Our Blue Meadows Engagement Officer, Eden, gives us all the details…

From the outset, one message resonated clear: the future of seagrass meadows depends on people.

The symposium opened with a powerful keynote from J.Brooke Landry, sharing lessons from Chesapeake Bay that emphasised the importance of working with communities to protect areas before restoration begins.

Throughout the sessions, conversations returned to the central role of people in long term seagrass protection and recovery, a message at the heart of our Blue Meadows approach.

Across the two days, a diverse and inspiring array of talks and posters were presented, spanning blue finance, restoration, mapping and modelling, blue carbon and ecosystem services, socio-ecological systems and biodiversity and functional ecology. Collectively, the sessions showed the latest developments in seagrass conservation and the increasingly sophisticated tools, approaches and thinking being applied across the UK, with our team sharing updates from our own Blue Meadows work.

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Importantly, there was a strong emphasis on sharing failures as well as successes, fostering a culture of learning to strengthen the future of restoration and avoid repeated mistakes.

Working in partnership with Sonardyne, MarineSee, Voyis and Blue Robotics, we have been developing a specialised Remote Operated Vehicle (ROV); an exciting tool that will enable us to map seagrass in unprecedented detail. In the session dedicated to mapping and monitoring seagrass, our Habitat Monitoring Officer, Miriam, showcased how the ROV can support large scale restoration planning across the UK, by delivering high-resolution photogrammetry to monitor Zostera marina beds. Other speakers highlighted the use of satellite imagery, drones and multi-scale technologies that are transforming our understanding of these habitats. Restoration science sessions explored microbial drivers of seed germination, temperature driven distribution shifts and optimisation of seed selection. Tadgh, our Senior Seagrass Aquaculture Technician, presented promising updates from our HMS

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OCToPUS, demonstrating how a single unit can inject 2,000 seeds into the seabed in under 20 minutes.

With anthropogenic pressures on seagrass increasingly recognised, several talks examined the drivers of decline. Water quality was a key theme, with research from Cornwall, Northumberland, Northern Ireland and the Channel Islands, highlighting how pollution remains a significant and ongoing threat to seagrass health.

Building on this, the socio-ecological session showed that while human activity can drive declines, the recovery of seagrass also depends on human action.

Historical records, community participation and the Wales National Action Plan were discussed, emphasising how people are central to restoration initiatives. Sharing the method behind the Blue Meadows community engagement programme, Eden, explained how a Theory of Change can be used to ensure communities feel connected to seagrass and are empowered to take action for its protection.

The Symposium also tackled the complexities of funding nature recovery, exploring biodiversity markets, carbon credits, community value, and the development of seagrass tokens. Experts from across the finance and conservation sectors emphasised the importance of collaboration in unlocking sustainable investment for seagrass and other blue habitats. Research from National Oceanographic Centre, the University of Plymouth and the University of Exeter, underlined the importance of seagrass as a nature-based solution for climate change mitigation, while Mark, our Head of Ocean Habitat Restoration, shared insights from our deep-core sampling work along the South Coast, helping to build the evidence needed for sustainable investment in seagrass restoration.

Creativity flowed throughout the symposium, from the interpretative seagrass dance performed by Clowndance Seagrass Project to the creative academic posters, and the ‘seagrass of hope’ mural.

A highlight for many was the creative connection workshop lead by Dr Katie Debois and marine wildlife artist Oliver Ledger, which invited participants to explore what seagrass means to them, and together create a collaborative art piece. Oliver also shared the story of ‘Ambassador’, his work highlighting the challenges facing seagrass meadows, which promoted thoughtful reflection among attendees. It was inspiring to see how art and science came together to communicate seagrass conservation in engaging and accessible ways.

As the symposium drew to a close, Howard Wood OBE, reminded us of the transformative power of community through the story of Arran’s COAST, where decades of local stewardship have delivered remarkable marine recovery. Delegates were left inspired and optimistic for the future of seagrass meadows.

The next UK Seagrass Symposium will travel north to Scotland in 2027 hosted by the Scottish Association for Marine Science, making its journey across the UK, continuing to connect people, science and action for seagrass meadows.

For the Ocean Conservation Trust, the Symposium reflected everything we stand for, collaboration, community-led conservation, and the power of positive action. Events like this remind us of what’s possible when science, communities and action come together.

Through Blue Meadows, we remain committed to the protection and restoration of seagrass meadows within the UK. Find out more about our work by scanning the QR code.

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The National A few months ago, we were delighted to unveil our new and improved National Seagrass Nursery, England’s largest seagrass growing facility.

Our dedicated Ocean Habitat Restoration Team spent months working on some major upgrades, all of which will help increase the impact of our seagrass conservation work.

With our improved facility ready to go, it was then time to start seed collection!

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Seagrass Nursery When we launched our Blue Meadows Programme, back in 2022, we developed a 400 square metre purpose-built facility for plant aquaculture, to help us achieve restoration at scale. Recognising the need to increase efficiency and allow ourselves to be pioneering in nature recovery and restoration, we have now invested in some key improvements.

Automated water abstraction, advanced filtration of circulating water and enhanced climate control to maintain optimum growing conditions, will allow us to grow seagrass all year round in the nursery. Currently, the National Seagrass Nursery has the capacity to grow 7,200 plants each year, but with further planned expansions that we have in the pipeline, that number could double to 14,400 annually. Each plant cultivated and cared for in the nursery is replanted into one of our restoration sites across the southwest.

With our new and improved facility ready to go, and seagrass flowering in the Ocean, it was time to get on with seed collection.

Our team of qualified divers headed out to Mounts Bay and St Austell to hand collect seeds. Our harvesting efforts ended up with us bringing 244kg of flowering shoots back to the National Seagrass Nursery, where they undergo a process called mulching, designed to mimic the natural way seagrass disperses its seeds in the Ocean.

Each shoot can have up to 10 seed spathes, where the fertilised seeds fully develop before they pop out. Our Seagrass Aquaculture Technicians set up 6 large tubs with the seagrass plant material sitting in mesh hammocks which allow the seeds to drop to the bottom while the remaining plant material can be removed.

After a couple of weeks all of the seeds will have dropped from the plant material so they can easily be siphoned out.

The bounty of seeds is rinsed and sieved repeatedly, with the help of our marvellous team of volunteers. We then also look over by eye to ensure as much non seed material as possible is removed. This is crucial when it comes to storage as our seed storage facility operates at its best when the filters are not getting clogged with non seed material.

The mulching period is coming to an end, and we will have close to 850,000 seeds. These will be stored in our seed storage facility until they are ready to be put back into the Ocean as part of our restoration work.

All of these efforts form part of our ambitious targets to restore more than 50 hectares of seagrass meadows every year - a vital step towards a future with a healthy, thriving Ocean.

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Celebrating our biggest and most inclusive STEMFest yet!

Our passionate Learning Team tells us all about their biggest event of the year, STEMFest! Loved by students and teachers alike, 2025 saw our team deliver the biggest and most inclusive STEMFest yet!

For three weeks across September and October, our Learning Team hosted STEMFest, an annual event that ties together STEM learning and marine conservation for children. Each year has a different theme, and this year we designed STEMFest to complement the public engagement initiative of Ocean Friendly Homes. The Ocean Friendly Homes initiative is centred around educating people on the impacts that behaviours and choices we make in our homes have on the Ocean, empowering people to make sustainable, pro-Ocean choices.

The Ocean Friendly Homes themed STEMFest was our biggest to date! The National Marine Aquarium welcomed 1,600 school children for in-person STEMFest activities.

We’re proud to say that 1,000 of these children, from local schools in Plymouth with high levels of pupil premium funding, attended completely free of charge thanks to funding from the amazing people at SDS Solutions and the Edina Trust!

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Furthermore, because transport costs are a common barrier for schools wanting to take trips, we funded the transport for these schools, making the event as accessible as possible. Additionally, we ran an in-person STEMFest day exclusively for home-educated children, attended by 71 children and their families.

Children who attended our in-person event started their day with a group show in our Eddystone exhibit. We used fun audience participation techniques and (very safe!) fire-based demonstrations to teach about electricity generation and the impacts of carbon dioxide emissions on the environment. Groups then took part in guided tours of the National Marine Aquarium, where they learned about ways they can make their homes more Ocean-friendly, including the importance of reducing their carbon footprint and recycling materials.

In the workshop, students got hands-on and made their very own solar powered fan from recycled materials to take home. Our Learning Team worked hard over the summer holidays to acquire and prepare these materials, which involved many, many hours sanding blocks of wood, cutting up piping and spray painting… But it was all worth it to give the students the opportunity to design, build and wire their very own piece of technology! The children’s faces when they tested their working fans in the sun (or under a lamp on cloudier days - it is Plymouth after all) really were a picture!

Alongside our in-person events, we also delivered a free virtual STEMFest session, which was an abridged version of the show and tour, allowing classes and families from all over the UK to take part in the initiative. In total, we engaged with 2,216 viewers!

Hosting this annual event is so important to give students the opportunity to learn and practice STEM-based skills, while also seeing how these skills apply to real-world situations.

Our Learning Team is so proud of what we’ve achieved at this year’s STEMFest. Over 1,600 children left the National Marine Aquarium with a solar powered fan, the knowledge of how to make their home more Ocean-friendly, and the inspiration to take further action for a healthy Ocean.

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Ocean Friendly Innovation Project But that wasn’t the end of STEMFest 2025! Our Learning Team then headed out during October and November to deliver free follow-up outreach sessions to the schools that participated in STEMFest. During these sessions they launched our Ocean Friendly Innovation project, in which children were set the challenge of designing their very own Ocean Friendly Innovation that would benefit our homes.

The most exciting part of the project is that the winning design will be manufactured and distributed to the homes of all the children in Plymouth that attended STEMFest inperson! We’re so excited to see what incredible designs the children come up with.

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This is where local manufacturers and businesses have a unique opportunity to get involved! We are calling on engineers, developers, and manufacturers across Plymouth and the wider South West to partner with us and help turn these student ideas into real-world products. Support could take many forms, whether through financial backing, lending expertise in the build, or helping to select the winning design – all playing a vital role in turning creative ideas into real-world solutions.

If you are a business and would like to get involved, get in touch with our OCT Learning team by scanning the QR code!

The Ocean’s Voice At the Ocean Conservation Trust, we are dedicated to connecting everyone with the Ocean, no matter their age, or where they live. The Ocean’s Voice is a new intergenerational project that aims to connect generations together who share a love of the Ocean.

We will run a variety of engaging sessions to connect people with the Ocean. This will include tours of the National Marine Aquarium, VR sessions, crafts, boat trips, rockpooling, and more!

Bringing younger and older people together will allow them to foster a sense of connection, reduce loneliness and provide unique learning opportunities for both groups.

Keep your eyes peeled for updates as our new project progresses!

Over the course of a year, they will share their knowledge and memories of the Ocean, which will culminate in designing and creating an artefact to celebrate Ocean Culture and heritage.

We are delighted to be kicking off our pilot project with 6 people aged 12-18 and 6 people aged 55+. In each session, young people will be paired with an older person, and each will be encouraged to share stories and knowledge of the Ocean with each other.

We would like to give a special thanks to Ashfords LLP, the Iconic Challenge Legacy Fund and to all that donated to this project through our Big Give Appeal.

You have helped us bring this project to life!

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A global research initiative:

The Ocean & Society Survey The Ocean & Society Survey (OSS) is a global research initiative that assesses people’s knowledge, feelings and behaviours related to the Ocean to understand human-Ocean connections. It is a collaborative project designed to help policymakers, educators, and communicators create more effective Ocean literacy and conservation campaigns by identifying what influences people’s views and actions toward the Ocean. We are delighted that our Head of Ocean Advocacy and Engagement, Nicola, was one of the co-creators.

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The United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development runs from 2021 to 2030. 10 years to tackle 10 Challenges for the healthy future of 1 Ocean. The Challenges are ambitious, so the Vision 2030 process was set up to support each of the 10 Challenges, which led to the creation of a set of White papers, outlining key recommendations to address the Challenges.

Challenge 10, ‘restoring society’s relationship with the Ocean’ is key to ensure the success of all the other Challenges on a global scale. Ocean health is impacted by human values, attitudes and behaviours, so pathways for public engagement and people-driven solutions are essential.

The Ocean & Society Survey was created to directly respond to recommendations from the Challenge 10 White Paper. In particular, to prioritise increased research and investment in marine social sciences, so that we can better understand people-Ocean connections and Ocean health. The OSS focuses on public perceptions towards the Ocean; how they understand, value and/or engage with the Ocean.

The OSS was led by our friends at the Centre for Ocean Literacy Collaboration, and developed through an 18-month co-design process, including 20 core partners and over 30 collaborators from across the globe. The development of the OSS built upon three existing national Ocean literacy surveys, one of which was the UK’s largest survey, created in 2022 by ourselves and Defra.

Given the diversity of ways that people connect to and depend on the Ocean, the OSS is a global method for gathering public insights into how people understand, value and engage with it. It explores perceptions of personal connections to the Ocean, including emotions,

lifestyle choices, willingness to change habits, awareness of Ocean benefits, access to the Ocean and sources of information about the Ocean. By capturing these responses, we can identify behavioural motivations, barriers and enablers, informing engagement approaches that reflect people’s lived experiences.

Up until 2030 there will be multiple survey iterations, which will allow us to track changes in public-Ocean connections and Ocean literacy. In turn, this will allow the global Ocean community to refine their understanding of what drives people so we can create measurable, solution-focused action within communities. Public perceptions of the Ocean are not static, and the challenges facing the Ocean are continually shifting due to factors such as climate change, technologies, social and political contexts. By regularly gathering data on public Ocean perceptions, we can monitor these shifts and adjust strategies accordingly.

This ongoing feedback loop is crucial for maintaining the momentum of public engagement and ensuring that efforts to restore Ocean health remain responsive to the needs and connections of diverse populations.

We know that to truly understand the significance of how we relate to the Ocean, broader input is required.

We need to have a more coordinated, collaborative and transdisciplinary approach. This is what the survey brings, a holistic, people-driven framework that addresses the interconnected challenges facing the Ocean.

So, what are the next steps? The goal is to have the survey live in at least 100 countries by 2030. We are excited to see the global outcomes of this survey, and use it to refine our strategy and work towards a future with a healthy, thriving Ocean.

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Fundraise for the Ocean As members of our community of Ocean Optimists, you already support us and our important work.

But, as some of you have asked what else you can do to help us in our work towards a healthy, thriving Ocean, we thought we would feature some fundraising ideas for you!

From taking part in an event to organising your own, you can raise funds by getting involved in a range of activities.

Get inspired, choose your challenge, and dive in!

Get wet and connect with the Ocean – Love spending time in and on the water? Whether it’s a swim in your local pool, a sponsored paddle during your next kayaking trip, or a row with your local club, use your next water adventure to raise money for the Ocean.

Stay dry and challenge yourself – Do you like to run, cycle or walk? Whether it’s by yourself or as part of a group, these can be simple yet impactful ways to start your fundraising journey.

Get creative with friends and family – Baking, crafting, or hosting a quiz; there are lots of ways you can use your creativity and hobbies to raise money for the Ocean, and this is a great one to do with family and friends!

How your fundraising helps the Ocean The funds you raise will be used wherever the need is greatest to have the most impact, whilst always contributing to our vision of a healthy, thriving Ocean.

Below are some of the ways your support could help.

• £36 could help deliver our Ocean Squad programme, giving teenagers an in-depth experience learning about the Ocean.

• £50 could help us install marker buoys to protect existing seagrass meadows and allow them to regenerate.

• £300 helps us engage a community, sharing our love of seagrass and helping more water users show the respect it needs.

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£500 could help us upgrade one VR headset, to use in schools, care homes and out in the community.

• £3,000 could help us protect one hectare of seagrass, that’s nearly a whole football pitch in size.

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How to get started

How we will support you

If this is the first time you have organised a fundraising activity, then below are some helpful tips to get you started.

• Personal guidance and fundraising tips from our supportive fundraising team.

• Choose your fundraising activity, where and when you’ll do it, and who is taking part with you.

• Set a target and create your JustGiving fundraising page. Make sure to personalise it with your story and photos!

• Share your fundraiser with friends and family, on social media and with your work colleagues. Regularly share updates so they can follow your journey.

• Whatever you’re doing, have fun! You’re doing something amazing for the Ocean.

• Option of our brand-new challenge t-shirt or swim hat once you have raised £50.

• Access to promotional materials to help with your fundraiser, including our ‘proud to support’ logo.

If you are feeling inspired and want to talk about your fundraising journey, then scan the QR code to get in touch with our Fundraising Officer, Alice.

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