The vessel rolled in the swell as fishers pulled huge nets bursting with tuna onto the deck then poured the catch down a loading hatch.
But Melissa Cronin wasn’t there for the tuna. She was looking for ways to save manta and devil rays caught by accident. The marine ecologist at Duke University cofounded the Mobula Conservation Project, named after the genus of these fishes.
She spent four months at sea, split over two trips of two months each, onboard fishing vessels watching hundreds of metric tons of tuna being caught and recording data while fishing crew tested out a new device aimed at saving rays. The simple grid,