When I was eight years old, I begged my parents for a giant fish tank so that I could collect all of my favourite fish. Every Sunday, my dad and I usually went to the nearby pet shop, and he would patiently wait for me to closely examine the Betta fish before announcing my favourite. Fish have been ever-present in my life, and I’ve always been mesmerised by their various forms and diversity of colours.

I grew up in the middle of a small city surrounded by buildings in South Tangerang; the ocean is very distant. Still, I was naturally drawn to it whenever I watched an ocean documentary with large marine mammals. After graduating from high school, I always wanted to explore something that matters to me personally. In my family, becoming a civil servant or an engineer was the more traditional career route. My family often laughed at my decision to study marine science, because they thought that my career aspiration was to be a fisherman. At that time, they believed that studying marine science meant that I would have to voyage for years out in the open ocean – they worried that I would be at risk of drowning and being lost at sea.

When I was studying marine science during my undergraduate degree, I started to develop my passion for conservation. I always love marine megafauna with its mysterious life histories; sea turtles, whales, and sharks are so charismatic to me. In 2014, I started to focus on marine conservation with regard to shark fishing issues. Indonesia is the largest shark fishing nation globally. More than 100,000 tons of sharks and rays are exported annually, pushing more than 30% of threatened species to extinction in around the more 16,000 islands. But at that time, contributing to marine conservation always left me puzzled, and I still wondered what kind of individual contribution I could make to help conserve the endangered sharks.

In 2016, my love for sharks and rays solidified when I joined the Lamakera Project – a consortium of NGOs such as Manta Trust, Misool Foundation, and ReefCheck Indonesia. The mission was to transition the biggest manta ray hunting community into sustainable alternatives to support their livelihoods in Lamakera village. For a city boy like me, issues like this seemed extremely distant. I didn’t realise that a remote community had been hunting manta rays for centuries. They have depended on manta rays for their livelihood and food security for a long time. This is only an example of many hundreds of communities that may be in similar circumstances.

Though it was a small community, solving livelihood conflicts and finding ways to ensure they no longer relied on hunting manta rays was not an easy job. The manta ray practice has been deep-rooted for generations, and proposing conservation alternatives means introducing a new and complicated behaviour change to this community. It will take years until it is finally accepted and adopted as a new way of life.