For years, honestly since SEVENSEAS started, readers have asked us versions of the same questions. How do I break into this field? How do I make my next career move? Who’s working on the kind of project I want to be part of? Where do I find someone who’s done what I’m trying to do?

If you’ve ever wished you knew someone working in marine policy, or a researcher in another country doing fieldwork like yours, or a retired expert with decades of perspective, or a peer at the same career stage navigating the same decisions, you know the problem. The path through ocean conservation isn’t obvious at any stage. It’s not always just on a job board. It’s almost always: someone took a chance on someone else, made an introduction, answered a late-night email, said let me put you in touch with…

That’s true for an undergrad trying to find their first internship. It’s also true for a mid-career professional pivoting from research into policy. It’s true for a senior scientist exploring an unfamiliar region or sector. And it’s true for two early-career conservationists in different countries who’d both benefit from comparing notes.

Today we’re launching the SEVENSEAS Mentor Network — a beta version of something this community has been asking for forever. It’s a directory of people in ocean conservation who are willing to be reachable, and a directory of people who are looking for guidance, advice, or just a thoughtful conversation. At any career stage. In any direction.

It’s free. It’s open globally. And it only works if enough of us show up — as mentors, as mentees, and often as both.

 

A note on what we built, and specifically what we didn’t

We are deliberately not trying to reinvent the wheel. We didn’t build a social network. We didn’t build a messaging platform. You just register yourself in the directory and the actual conversations happen on LinkedIn, where your profile and professional identity already exists. We stay out of the way. We kept it short, and once you’re in, you’re done.

That’s the whole design.

So why not just message people on LinkedIn directly?

Because there are millions of people on LinkedIn, and most of them don’t care about ocean conservation, don’t check their messages, or have accounts they haven’t logged into in years. Cold messaging strangers is a bad experience for everyone — both the sender (who gets ignored) and the receiver (who’s overwhelmed).

The SEVENSEAS Mentor Network is different because everyone in it has actively raised their hand. This directory is curated from our community: the roughly 50,000 newsletter subscribers and the thousands more who visit our site every month. People who already care about ocean conservation, are already invested in the field, and have explicitly said yes, I want to be part of this. That’s not a small distinction. It’s the entire point.

Who this is for and what mentoring actually means

We want to expand what mentorship can look like, because the traditional version, “senior expert generously dispenses wisdom to grateful newcomer,”  is only one possibility, and not always the most valuable one.

Mentors can be senior researchers, mid-career professionals, retired experts with decades of perspective, or someone who’s only a year or two ahead of where you are. Sometimes the most useful person to talk to is someone who just navigated what you’re trying to navigate.

Mentees can be undergrads, grad students, career changers — but also senior professionals exploring a new area of conservation work, or people late in their careers wanting to learn from younger voices about tech, media, or doing things differently. There is no age cap, no career stage requirement, and no shame in asking questions at any level.

Peer-to-peer connections are encouraged. Two early-career conservationists in different countries comparing notes can be just as valuable as a one-way mentorship. Two retired marine biologists trading thoughts on policy work could be transformative. We don’t think mentorship has to flow downhill.

And critically: there is no obligation. Sometimes mentoring is a 30-minute Zoom call once. Sometimes it’s a five-minute response to a message about which grad program is realistic. Sometimes it’s reading a cover letter or saying I don’t know, but here’s who might.

You set the terms. You respond when you can. If your inbox is full this month, that’s fine. The whole point is to lower the friction for the kind of small, generous interactions that already happen informally in this field, and make them findable.

 

How it works and we need you to sign up

1. Browse the directory (Find a Mentor or the Mentee Directory) and see profiles with focus areas, regions, languages, career stages, and a short note about what each person can offer or is hoping to learn. We have a few sample profiles up to get you started.
2. Click their LinkedIn link and send a brief, specific message.
3. The conversation happens on LinkedIn  exactly like any other professional connection.

That’s it. No new platform to log into daily. No notifications. No “engagement metrics.”

If you’re working in ocean conservation in any capacity — research, policy, NGO work, fisheries, journalism, art, education, citizen science, communications, diving, restoration, anything — please consider joining as a mentor:

→ Become a Mentor

If you’re looking for guidance, regardless of your career stage:

→ Apply for Mentorship

Both sign-ups take about five minutes. We do a quick admin review (we want to keep this a real, intentional community) and then your profile goes live.

Please share this

If you read this and think I know exactly the person who should be in this directory — please send them this article.

Forward it to colleagues. Mention it to your students. Send it to the friend who’s been lost between undergrad and a real job in conservation. Pass it along to your alumni networks, your former professors, the diving instructor who introduced you to the ocean in the first place. Share it with schools, university programs, marine labs, NGO listservs, professional associations, anywhere this might land in front of someone who’d benefit.

A directory is only as useful as the people in it. The single most valuable thing you can do today, even if you don’t sign up yourself, is share this with two people.

Read this before signing up

This is beta. We’ve tested it, but you’ll find rough edges. Tell us about them at info@sevenseasmedia.org — we’ll fix and improve as we go.

This is community infrastructure, not a service. Nobody is being paid. Nobody is guaranteed a match. The Mentor Network works to the extent that the people in this community decide to make themselves reachable, and others reach out thoughtfully.

This is a starting point. Group programs, peer cohorts, structured curricula — those may come later. Let us know what you’d want to see.

Whether you’re joining as a mentor, a mentee, or both, please read our Code of Conduct. It covers the basics: respect, honesty, no harassment, no commercial solicitation. We’re 18+ only and we take community standards seriously.

Ready?

Take five minutes today.

→ Become a Mentor → Apply for Mentorship → Browse the Mentor Directory → Browse the Mentee Directory

The ocean conservation sector has a generosity problem in one direction . People genuinely want to help, but the pipeline for that help is informal, opaque, and dependent on whether you happen to know the right people. This is one small attempt to make it less so.

If you’ve ever wished someone had given you five minutes of their time when you were starting out, or if you’d like five minutes of someone else’s time now, sign up, share it, and help us build something useful.

There was a stretch of years, 2016 to 2019, give or take, when we lived in Bangkok and regularly made our way to Koh Samet, where the squid boats came out every evening and peppered the horizon green. The lights pull the squid up, and the nets do the rest. By the time we moved out of Thailand, it was well reported that these nighttime hauls had been thinning for a while. Not just the squid, but the by-catch too, the mixed small fish that don’t reach the menu and end up instead in fishmeal, which feeds the shrimp ponds, which feed an export industry, which mostly feeds countries that don’t include Thailand. A kilo of those small fish once cost almost nothing at the dawn market and in Thai coastal homes they used to be lunch. Now they were feed for somewhere else’s shrimp.

 

This isn’t an essay about Thailand. Not yet. It’s an essay about a map.

This spring the United Nations World Food Programme unveiled the latest iteration of HungerMap LIVE, a digital platform that has been quietly remaking how we see hunger. The map covers dozens countries. It pulls in food security indicators from the WFP’s own real-time call-in surveys with actual humans on actual phones, every day, and layers them over weather and rainfall, vegetation and conflict, market prices and currency moves. Where the data thins out, it uses machine-learning “nowcasts” to estimate what’s happening right now in places too remote, too dangerous, or too expensive to survey daily. You can open it on your laptop. It updates while you watch. “Without data, the fight against hunger is fought in the dark,” Cindy McCain, the WFP’s Executive Director, said when the new version launched. It is the kind of line you write for a launch, but it couldn’t be more true.  

The map is the public face of work led by Dr. Kyriacos Koupparis, who runs the WFP’s Hunger Monitoring Unit and, before that, ran Frontier Innovations at the WFP Innovation Accelerator. The lineage matters; we’ll come back to it.

The story Koupparis tells about how the platform got here is, refreshingly, not about machine learning. “The piece that made everything else possible was actually the simplest: picking up the phone,” he wrote when I asked about the arc. WFP’s first large-scale mobile phone surveys [what became the mVAM program] proved you could reach food-insecure households in real time, without waiting months for a field mission, and that dataset became the backbone of everything that came later. “The machine learning is only as good as what it learned from,” he added, “and what it learned from was years of patient, unglamorous phone interviewing in places most people couldn’t find on a map.” The jump from those CATI pilots to a platform covering dozens countries was, in his telling, a data infrastructure story rather than a technology one. “We just eventually got smart enough to let the AI do something useful with it.”

 

 

What’s worth noticing about the map is how it thinks. It refuses to pretend hunger is its own subject. On any country, you can pull up a hunger layer and then drop on top of it a drought, a conflict, an inflation curve, a falling currency, and watch them describe the same shape. The map is a solid argument that food insecurity is never just food.

Which brings us to the ocean.

About 3.2 billion people on this planet get a meaningful share of their animal protein from the sea. In coastal Pacific nations and parts of West Africa and Southeast Asia, that share runs past half. Strip those fisheries out and you don’t have a conservation problem, you have a hunger problem. This is not a controversial claim, the FAO has been making it for years, but it lives mostly in the fisheries literature and rarely on the kind of map a finance minister or a donor opens at breakfast.

 

Here is the thing the HungerMap quietly proves. Every variable it overlays is also a variable in the life of a fishery. The drought it tracks across the Horn of Africa is the same drought collapsing the freshwater inflows that feed Lake Turkana’s tilapia. The cyclones it counts in the Bay of Bengal are the same ones flattening shrimp ponds in coastal Bangladesh and Mozambique. The conflict layer in Yemen is also a fisheries layer with the small dhows that don’t go out, the cold chains that don’t run, the markets that don’t open. Marine heatwaves shift fish stocks poleward at, by some estimates, seventy kilometers a decade; the households that lose those stocks show up in the food security data a season or two later. The map doesn’t have a fish layer. It almost doesn’t need one. The fish are already in there, sideways. 

All of that layering depends, in places where the surveys can’t reach, on machine learning. Koupparis is unsentimental about what it actually does. “What the nowcasting does, simply put, is learn the relationship between observable signals — rainfall, prices, conflict events, vegetation cover — and food security outcomes measured through our surveys,” he said. “Then it applies that learned relationship to places and moments where we don’t have a survey. It fills the silence.” The limits are the more useful part of the explanation. “What it cannot do is see a shock that has no historical precedent. A novel conflict dynamic, a crop disease we’ve never modelled, a political collapse that rewrites the rules overnight — the model doesn’t know what it doesn’t know.” What he keeps coming back to is simpler: “The nowcast tells you where to look, urgently. It doesn’t replace the person who actually looks.”

Two decades ago I worked on marine rapid assessments in Madagascar and New Caledonia, under Dr. Sheila McKenna at Conservation International. The premise of that work was to get into a place fast, count what’s there, name what’s changing, hand the answer to people who can use it. It turns out to be the same instinct driving the HungerMap. The expedition has just become an algorithm. The boat has become a dashboard. The instinct is older than either: see fast, act early, don’t wait for the obituary. It is also, for what it’s worth, the only instinct in conservation that has ever really worked.

 

“We just eventually got smart enough to let the AI do something useful with it.” — Kyriacos Koupparis, WFP Hunger Monitoring Unit

So, this is my small case for the map, made from the ocean side of the classroom. We are not, in marine work, going to get our own version of HungerMap any time soon. The data isn’t built, the political will isn’t either, and the money is somewhere else. What we can do is read this one. A platform that watches climate hazards, conflict, prices, and nutrition in the same frame is a platform that already, whether anyone planned it that way, watches fisheries- because everything that breaks a fishery is on it.

The same Innovation Accelerator that incubated the HungerMap also incubated, ten years ago, a smaller and much less complicated tool. ShareTheMeal is an app. You tap. Eighty cents goes to feed a child for a day. It started in Berlin in 2014 as someone’s sabbatical project and since then, nearly two million users have channeled donations into more than two hundred and seventy million meals. It is the least dramatic piece of software the United Nations has ever produced, and on a per-dollar basis, possibly the most useful. The map and the app are not the same kind of object. They are however the same kind of bet, that visibility and small action, repeated, compound. If this essay has done its job, you’ll see why I’m closing on it.

Asked why he does the work, Koupparis wrote: “I do this work because hunger is the most solvable crisis on earth, and we keep failing to solve it — not for lack of food, but for lack of attention arriving in time.”

Back on the coast of Koh Samet where we started: the boats still go out. Smaller fish, fewer fish, same lights. Whether a household in that province eats well next year depends on weather a continent away, on a war someone hasn’t started yet, on a currency that may or may not slip, and most of which will be visible, in something like real time, on a map that doesn’t quite know it is also a map of the sea.

By Giacomo Abrusci, SEVENSEAS Media

“They came back,” says biologist Donald Webster. “This year.” His voice has a wistful note, wondering if the king of ducks, as the beautiful, crimson-headed canvasback is known, will return to rule Chesapeake Bay winter after winter. The Chesapeake is the largest estuary in the U.S. and the third largest in the world. It’s one of the globe’s most productive waterbodies.

Bundled in parka, gloves and hat, Webster, who recently retired as a waterfowl habitat biologist for the Maryland Department of Natural Resources (DNR), raises his binoculars near a seawall at the confluence of Chesapeake Bay and the Choptank River. The Choptank is one of the bay’s 19 major tributaries. The overlook is a mecca for wintering canvasbacks and other ducks.

“Canvasbacks, the ducks everyone comes to see, are usually here in force by Christmas,” Webster says. “They stay until just before St. Patrick’s Day, then they’re gone, heading north to nesting grounds.”

Skeins of Waterfowl

On this January morning with northwest winds and temperatures that hover just above freezing, the canvasbacks’ red heads stand out in winter-dark waters. The ducks glide near the seawall, where photographers jostle for the quintessential shot of an iconic Chesapeake species. “This place is known as the ‘wall of shame,'” laughs Webster, “because it’s almost too easy to get great canvasback pictures here.”

Chesapeake skies fill with migrating seaducks – canvasbacks, buffleheads, greater and lesser scaup, and many others – from December through March. The bay is the Atlantic Coast’s most important waterfowl migration and wintering area. The Chesapeake offers refuge to 24 species of ducks as well as Canada geese, greater snow geese and tundra swans.

“Long-term worsening of the bay’s water quality, however, and loss of habitat, especially the seagrasses so many of these birds depend on, have contributed to declines in wintering waterfowl populations,” says Webster.

Seesawing Seagrass Estimates

An estimated 82,778 acres of submerged aquatic vegetation (SAV) remained in the bay and its tributaries in 2024, the most recent year with available data, down from historic levels that may have reached more than 600,000 acres. Globally, seagrasses have declined almost 30% since the late 1800s; a football field worth of seagrass now disappears every second.

There’s good and bad news in the 2024 Chesapeake Bay SAV estimate. It’s a significant increase over the 38,958 acres observed in the first survey in 1984. But it’s a large decrease from 2018, with its 108,078 acres of underwater grasses. Although the exact reasons for the decline aren’t known, one culprit may be high river flows that reduce water clarity and block sunlight from reaching the grasses.

“This is a dynamic ecosystem with natural variation in SAV from year to year,” says Chris Patrick of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. “In the context of the decades of data we’ve collected, we remain on a positive trajectory.”

In 2011, the Chesapeake’s SAV declined to 48,195 acres, a result of Hurricane Irene and Tropical Storm Lee. The storms sent a flood of sediment cascading into the bay. After 2011, conditions became relatively dry, reducing the flow of grass-smothering sand and mud. More sunlight reached submerged grasses, allowing them to rebound. In return, the SAV filtered runoff, helping keep Chesapeake waters clear.

Forty years ago, SAV reached a low point in parts of the bay. Another major storm, Tropical Storm Agnes in 1972, nearly wiped out the SAV at Susquehanna Flats, an expansive bed of grasses where the Susquehanna River widens and becomes Chesapeake Bay. The rush of floodwater from the roiling Susquehanna uprooted grasses at the Flats’ edges and deposited sediment there, blocking sunlight and photosynthesis. Then the storms of 2011 exacerbated the damage to the relatively shallow “Flats.”

The grasses, however, fought back. Their blades impede the river’s flow enough to prevent erosion of the beds’ inner cores. The plants create clear water in the middle of the beds, which promotes their growth and improves overall water clarity. When clean water sluices out of an SAV bed’s center into the surrounding bay, more light is available for the grasses to grow, allowing them to shoot up faster.

Duck Feast to Famine

Over Chesapeake Bay’s history, SAV has foundered and flourished. Canvasbacks and other waterfowl species have done the same. As recently as 1950, half the continent’s population of canvasbacks – more than a quarter million – wintered in the Chesapeake, relying on aquatic grasses as favored food sources.

During Colonial times, as many as 1 million of the ducks may have spent wintertime on the bay. In the 19th century, their abundance and, to many, good taste made them a favored selection in many East Coast restaurants, says Matt Kneisley, a regional director at Delta Waterfowl, a waterfowl conservation and hunting organization.

Canvasbacks congregate in large flocks on open waters, leading to easy – too-easy – harvesting. By the end of the 19th century, commercial hunters with batteries of weapons went after rafts of the ducks, often killing dozens with one shot. The “cans,” as hunters call them, were shipped by boxcar to markets from Baltimore to Boston. Such market hunting was outlawed with the passage of the U.S. Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918.

“Canvasbacks were a favored quarry because their meat was considered the tastiest of all the ducks due to their consumption of wild celery,” writes Guy Baldassarre in Ducks, Geese and Swans of North America.

Large beds of wild celery once attracted thousands of the ducks to Susquehanna Flats and elsewhere on the upper bay, according to Kneisley. Then a decline in the Chesapeake’s water quality greatly reduced the amount of wild celery. Tropical Storm Agnes was the final blow. “After the storm, wild celery was virtually impossible for canvasbacks to find,” says Kneisley.

The waterfowl switched their foraging efforts to small clams on the Chesapeake’s shallow bottom. A less nutritious diet of such shellfish as Baltic clams, scientists believe, may affect the ducks’ winter survival rates.

A Common Future

Annual bird counts, Webster says, “give us a very good picture of how much declines in SAV have affected wintering waterfowl.”

Half a century ago, 4 to 5 million ducks, geese and swans spent time on Chesapeake Bay during the winter. Now, that number is less than 1 million, according to results from an annual midwinter waterfowl survey. The nationwide count has taken place every year since the 1950s.

On the Chesapeake, survey teams of biologists from the Maryland DNR and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service fly transects to make visual estimates of waterfowl in the bay and along the nearby Atlantic coast. In 2026, the teams counted 926,900 ducks, geese and swans, higher than the 563,800 birds observed five years earlier in 2022. The best recent year was 2018, at 1,023,300.

Estimates of canvasbacks in 2026 were 25,300, and in 2022, 7,700. In 2023, the total for canvasbacks was 57,800. “Waterfowl are continuously responding to environmental cues, including weather, food availability and habitat quality,” says Karina Stonesifer, director of the Maryland DNR’s Wildlife and Heritage Service. Seven decades ago, in 1955, 225,450 canvasbacks were sighted. Nonetheless, says Webster, the Chesapeake “is still one of the best places on Earth to see waterfowl in winter.”

From Midwest Bird Nursery to the Chesapeake

Many of the bay’s wintering ducks began life in the prairie pothole region, which extends from the U.S. Midwest’s northern tier states into Canada. There, about half North America’s ducklings hatch.

As the ice sheets of the last glacial period retreated northward, tens of thousands of landlocked icebergs were left in their wakes, writes Michael Furtman in On the Wings of a North Wind: The Waterfowl and Wetlands of North America’s Inland Flyways.

These small icebergs melted into the soil. As they faded, Furtman states, “they became the foundation of the prairie potholes. An estimated 10 million glacially carved depressions once pockmarked the landscape of the prairie-pothole region of the United States and Canada.” As climate warmed, the potholes evolved into a habitat so enticing that more than 130 bird species have used a single pothole in a year.

With millions of potholes from which to choose, waterfowl had plenty of room to find nesting sites. “The diversity of potholes, ranging from small spring ponds to large permanent wetlands, provided ducks with the habitats necessary for each stage in their breeding and brood-rearing cycles,” Furtman states.

As wetlands in the region made way for agriculture, however, the number of potholes has decreased, especially over the last 40 years. In North Dakota’s pothole region, where as many as 100 of the basins per square mile once existed, “60 percent of the original 5 million acres of wetlands have been lost,” Furtman reports. “Ninety-five percent of that loss is attributable to agriculture.”

Is Past Prologue?

If increasing agriculture isn’t challenge enough for waterfowl, rising temperatures may result in more frequent and severe droughts in the prairie pothole region, with a significant effect on breeding ducks.

“Decades ago,” Webster says, “the Chesapeake was full of wintering canvasbacks. But no more. I’d like to see the days again when their dark red heads line up as far as you can see.”

Canvasbacks and the many other ducks that winter on the bay have come a long way to get there, Webster says. “The least we can do is show them some hospitality by making sure the environment – on their wintering and their breeding grounds – is healthy.”

Otherwise, he says, the Chesapeake’s winter waterfowl spectacle may vanish, the seawall along the Choptank indeed becoming a wall of shame as the last canvasback’s wingbeats fade into silence.

This story is an update of an article that ran in Oceanography magazine.

Written by Cheryl Lyn Dybas

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About the Author

Award-winning science journalist and ecologist Cheryl Lyn Dybas, a Fellow of the International League of Conservation Writers, brings a passion for wildlife and conservation to Ocean Geographic, BioScience, Natural History, Canadian Geographic, National Wildlife, Northern Wilds and many other publications, and is a Field Editor at Ocean Geographic.