He heads through the waters of San Miguel Bay toward his crab traps to check for their catch, sharing space on his boat with fellow fishermen Edgar Garcia and Santiago Camatoy. Rodel triangulates the crab traps’ location, based partly on landmarks and other visual cues, and partly on memory.

He arrives at each trap, signalled by a bobbing orange buoy at the water’s cool, dark green surface. The traps are long, rectangular frames wrapped tight with netting, weighed down on the sandy bottom with an anchor. When he pulls them up from the line by which they are strung, a crab will sometimes show up inside, its brilliant colours shining through a saltwater sheen. Some are as bright as cornflowers, with purple and blue mixing across their spotted bodies like watercolour paints bleeding together. Others look like crawling Neapolitan candies, their shells a mixture of pink, brown and white. Even after Rodel pulls up the crabs and brings them back to shore, these creatures and their capture will be constant fixtures of his day.

Hot, cooked crabs and heaps of rice make for lunch back at the Bolaños household, a meal for Rodel, his wife Ronilita, and their four children, 19-year-old Ian, 17-year-old Regine, 13-year-old Rabein, and 1-year-old Thali. A growing pile of cracked shells and claws forms at the centre of the table as the Bolaños family finishes their food. It is the same table where Rodel and his wife will record the stats from his morning catch. He will place each bounded-up crab on a light pink scale, while Ronilita takes down its weight. They’ll place measuring tape across the length of each crab’s shell, and take that number down as well. Every three or four days, Rodel will transport the catch to Noal Cereza, a broker 45 minutes across the bay in Mambungalon. They will usually fetch him about US$21 a day, out of which comes fuel and bait expenses, savings for future boat maintenance and repairs, and an equal cut for his boat mates, Edgar and Santiago.

In the afternoon, Rodel works on the traps. He makes around 20 traps each week, constructing them carefully by hand to make sure they will withstand the rolling ocean for as long as possible, and catch him crabs as reliably as they can. He builds the traps’ frames from metal and wood, sews long sheets of netting into tubes and stretches them taut over the frames. He cuts and ties knots into sturdy yellow cords that will hold the various parts together. Thali runs around among her father’s stacked traps, a bright, bouncing little figure against the netting in her pink tank top. Rodel will occasionally pause from his task, scoop her up, and dance and croon and talk to her. Once she has burned up her energy, she falls asleep on a pile of blankets in a big hammock fashioned out of the traps’ netting. Rodel continues his careful work.