Neptune Fund

Dr. Alifa Haque leads the Bengal Elasmo Lab collaboration, based at the University of Dhaka which is working to conserve the Critically Endangered sharks and rays in Bangladesh’s Bay of Bengal. Alifa and her team focus on values of meaningful collaboration, inclusiveness and equity, and the importance of acting based on scientific evidence. They work closely with local fishing communities to include them in their social and ecological research and identify barriers they face to taking conservation action. Alifa has a specific focus on sharks and rays including sawfishes, guitarfishes, and wedgefishes – all species which are facing extremely high levels of threat. By working with these communities to monitor sharks and rays caught by artisanal fisheries, she began learning about the challenges faced by local fishers and the obstacles preventing them from adhering to policies and regulations. 

Alifa’s meaningful connections with these communities has allowed the Bengal Elasmo Lab to work with them to monitor the species they catch, filling critical information gaps about this mega-diverse region of the ocean. The lab is now piloting a live-release campaign to encourage safe release of sawfish, and developing a National Action Plan for Sawfishes to create an institutional framework for sawfish conservation in Bangladesh.   

Save Andaman Network (SAN) is a locally-led Thai organisation committed to conserving the unique environment along Thailand’s Andaman coastline. The Neptune Fund is supporting SAN’s ‘Community Seagrass Restoration Project’, which is working with three coastal communities in Southern Thailand.  

SAN has carried out three seagrass valuation workshops across three partner communities, reaching a total of 115 people. They also carried out training on seagrass restoration and monitoring, and have planted its first ‘demo plots’ for seagrass restoration, which will allow SAN to work with communities and technical partners to develop best practice around seagrass restoration and test different techniques. A key element which SAN wanted to test in these plots is the viability of planting seagrass ‘rhizomes’ rather than seedlings. A rhizome is a thick, modified underground plant stem which acts in some ways like a root. Rhizomes are regularly washed ashore during the rainy season from current seagrass beds, meaning they can easily be collected on the beach, but restoration using these has not been properly tested before. After planting a mixture of 1,500 seedlings and rhizomes across three community demo plots, the team found after the first round of monitoring that seagrass planted from rhizomes were growing much better than those planted from seedlings. This is great news, as planting rhizomes is also much easier and requires less training than planting seedlings. The team will continue to monitor these demo plots, and will begin expansion of restoration work once a methodology is finalised which is backed up by this research. 

The Piku Biodiversity Network (PBN) is a coalition of individuals and organisations working collectively to conserve and manage the biodiversity of Papua New Guinea. They base their activities along the Kikori River and its delta. The latter is an ocean biodiversity hotspot home to 41 species of sharks and rays, 28 of which are on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Work supported by the Neptune Fund specifically focuses on the sawfish, a Critically Endangered species characterised by its long, toothed snout. 

Research since 2018 in the region has shown an alarming amount of bycatch of the sawfish and other species in fishing nets. Surveys conducted with fishers recorded that sawfish, when caught in nets, were unfortunately usually removed by cutting off the rostrum (snout). They also showed that locals had noticed a decline in the number of sawfish since the previous generation, creating further concern about their survival in the area. With previous funding, PBN has produced education and awareness materials, including a children’s story book and community pamphlets, that address some of the issues recorded for sawfish in Papua New Guinea. They cover information on their basic biology, sawfish importance to the ecosystem and their connection to wider conservation efforts, and a safe release guide. With funding from the Neptune Fund, PBN is printing and distributing these materials alongside an awareness campaign which includes outreach activities to schools along the Kikori River in Papua New Guinea, distribution of posters and books to schools and students, school lessons led by the PBN team, and games and other fun children’s activities with a theme around sawfish conservation. The Neptune Fund support is allowing PBN to hire a new Project Officer to lead this work, an important boost to its small team. 

“One of the first things that I found was that gaining trust of people is not something that you get in a year or two. It’s something that takes time, something that takes consistency. It took me four years before communities would listen to what I was saying. Today we mobilise 10 tribes across over 50 villages to work with the conservation of 6 species of turtles, 41 species of sharks and rays, two dolphin species and one just recently documented whale species.” – Yolarnie Amepou, Director of the Piku Biodiversity Network.