Bringing tides of change

Ocean vision

Growing up in Maoming, a coastal city in Guangdong province, Chen Lei, 24, felt close to the sea at a very young age. He would swim in the water every summer, and both his grandmothers were fisherwomen and would bring home fish for dinner.

That was probably part of the reason why Chen decided to join Better Blue as a volunteer in 2020 and went on to apply to become an intern last year.

Now a first-year graduate student at Macau University of Science and Technology, Chen works in his free time as a program planner at Better Blue, making educational videos and posters to promote marine knowledge. One of the video programs is Blue Knows with each episode introducing an interesting phenomenon in the ocean, such as how fish can hear without ears, how sea cucumbers poop, and what happens after a whale dies.

"I found that people, including many of my friends, know little about environmental protection, let alone ocean protection. I hope by watching our videos they can see the ocean the way divers see it — what the underwater world is like and what kind of amazing creatures live there — so they can be more aware of the importance of ocean protection," said Chen.

As of December 2022, Blue Knows has produced more than 130 videos and garnered 16.2 million views.

Chen learned scuba diving in 2019 and has regularly gone on diving trips with his friends ever since. One of the trips was in the sea near Zhuhai, Guangdong. The diving instructor told them that the area used to be covered with corals, so abundant and colorful that the reef could be seen above the surface by a drone. Chen flew a drone that day but didn't see anything. So they dove down to the area, only to find that the corals were all dead, just their gray skeletons on the seabed remaining.

"We realized how bad the situation was, how fragile the Earth's ecosystem was," Chen said. "Great efforts need to be made to revive the ocean environment to how it used to be."

Chen's target job after graduation is not exactly marine related as he studies supply chain management at school, but he is determined to use whatever spare time and energy he has to help protect the ocean.

"Maybe I can be working a full-time job while also interning at Better Blue, which is what I'm truly passionate about," said Chen.

"I really think that ocean protection is a cool thing to do."