'Guardian of the seas' hopes wave of public awareness will save the oceans, Yang Feiyue reports.

Shen Xiaoming has had several personas throughout his career. These include a cultural and tourism news reporter and an internet company boss.

Yet, after such diverse employment, Shen in his late 40s decided to make a splash as an ocean protector.

This no doubt stemmed from an early interest in diving.

The Shenzhen resident hosted a roundtable in early December where he invited renowned ocean ecologist Avigdor Abelson to lecture on the importance of public participation and collaboration in scientific research in ecological environment.

The audience included professors from Tsinghua University and the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

"Now during the pandemic, many foreign scholars cannot come to China, so we can communicate through this form of network to exchange new ideas and cases in the field of marine ecology abroad," Shen says.

In 2011, Shen went diving off Malaysia and was amazed by the underwater scenery he had never seen before.

"All kinds of fish swam past in groups, and the light overlapped against the deep blue landscape," Shen recalls.

The biggest surprise came when he reached the coral reef area, where he found himself in the middle of a bustling scene.

"I could hear the sound of pistol shrimp hitting the water with their chelipeds from the cave, and the gurgling of the croakers," he says.

"Some fish sounded like a hammer hitting a nail, and some made a sound like a steam whistle."

Yet, he found a completely different scene when he first dived into Dapeng Bay in Shenzhen, South China's Guangdong province, in 2014.

"It was silent, and not a sound could be heard from under the water," he says.

As he looked for reasons for the silence, he found some fishing boats had scraped the seafloor clean in previous years when conducting fishing operations, damaging the coral, one of the oldest creatures on the planet.

Replanting hope

Coral is the aggregation of limestone skeleton-like structures secreted by coral insects.

Though coral may look like a colorful plant growing from roots in the seafloor, it is actually an animal that forms reefs.

These reefs provide food and habitat for marine species around the globe.

Realizing the importance of coral reefs, Shen established public welfare organization Dive For Love with his diving friends in 2014.

"We believed that if corals were replanted, sea creatures such as wild groupers and abalone would come back," Shen explains.

They cleaned garbage from the seabed, where they found miscellaneous items, such as mesh tarpaulin, sacks and plastic bags.

They had seen crabs, sea urchins and various fish caught on the fishing nets, as well as some corals die for failing to conduct photosynthesis.

"We've seen people leave behind their swimsuits on the beach, which could be swept back to the sea," Shen says, adding that he has found one of them covering a big cave coral that was already whitened.

"It would take seven to eight years for a coral to grow up this big, but it only needs a cheap swimsuit to destroy it."

Another focus of the organization is to restore coral reef resources in Shenzhen.

Shen and his team would swim like fish in the ocean, searching for coral branches broken off by typhoons or trawler anchors.

"We then nurture them in seabed nursery gardens where they would be exposed to good sunlight and water flow," Shen explains.

The nursery gardens were developed after trial and error. They are made of iron pipes and flexible hot-melted pipes as the frame, with counterweights at the bottom and plastic nets hanging on the pipe frame to plant coral after his team's consultation with experts from the South China Sea Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

They managed to withstand the force of waves, while enabling the broken coral reefs to grow.

"When they recovered to a healthy state and grew to a certain degree, we would then use a specific glue to graft them onto natural coral reefs."

The glue is rock hard after 10 hours and is friendly to the ocean.

All the steps are meticulously conducted manually and are time-consuming, but Shen believes the efforts are worth it.

To date, Dive For Love has nearly 3,000 registered volunteers from all walks of life. "Most of them are between 20 and 40," Shen says.

They first learn how to dive for free before they are granted opportunities to give ocean protection lectures to new members or the public.

To date, the organization has helped to restore nearly 10,000 coral fragments.

Biodiversity survey

Shen has made a point of advocating ocean science popularization.

In 2017, volunteers from the organization staged a marathon where they wore coral reef-shaped headdresses and carried bags made of fishing nets to pick up trash along the way. The event was aimed to increase public awareness of their cause.

In 2018, Shen built a library on ocean culture.

"It's more about sorting out knowledge, and is complementary to the practical operations at Dive For Love," Shen says.

Shen and his team would share their findings on biodiversity at the library to appeal to the public.

"The biodiversity survey is mostly done at night, when the active creatures were different from their counterparts in the daytime," Shen explains.

They record their nocturnal diving experiences and edit them into short videos before putting them on the social media of the library.

The library has been a popular summer camp spot for young people, especially local primary school pupils.

Huang Yu joined Dive For Love in 2016 and she managed to take photos of hermatypic coral — a species under state second class protection — spawning multiple times, which has contributed to local coral archives.

"When the coral was spawning, it was like a powder snow in the sea, very beautiful," Huang says.

She put more efforts into popularizing coral protection after she saw how the sea creature was injured by fishing nets. "You feel like your own child is being amputated," she says.

Huang has also given livestream broadcast on explaining coral spawning, which received more than 2.9 million views from multiple social media accounts.

In recent years, the marine ecology of the Dapeng Peninsula has improved greatly due to the annual fishing moratorium, improved legal system, enhanced publicity on coral protection, and ongoing coral restoration and planting.

It is worth mentioning that the southwest end of the peninsula has a concentration of 47 species of hexacorallia, where a national marine park is being planned to better protect them.

"Such a prospect is worth looking forward to," Shen says.

Speaking about his future plans, Shen says he will keep on pushing forward his cause.

"Things happening at sea still get less attention compared with those on land," he says.

As things are resuming to normal state after three years of the pandemic, Shen is looking forward to stepping up cooperation with related parties in Indonesia and the Philippines.

"I believe more exchange programs will reach more people in the cause of ocean protection and help them appreciate the charm of the sea," Shen says.