Marine biologist Jessica Hoey tries to keep her daughter’s belief in mermaids alive.
Jessica Hoey is the director of reef health reporting at the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority. The reef forms part of her being, both in the office and in her personal life. She jumps at any chance to get her kids out on the ocean, from building forts out of drift wood on Lizard island to swimming with reef sharks. With her overactive imagination and Peter Pan attitude she hopes her kids value coral reefs as much as she does.
This story originally aired on May 11, 2018 in an episode titled “In Honor of Mother's Day.”
Story Transcript
So my five-year-old daughter Kiki looked up at me with her big blue eyes with complete trust, like a puppy, and she said to me, “Mom, are mermaids real?” Before I answered I thought about it, paused, and I thought, I could give her a semi-scientific answer and say, “Well, they are mythical creatures that sailors used to see and they actually saw dugongs, if you're in Australia, or manatees, if you're in the U.S., and they mistook them for mermaids.”
But instead, I looked down at her and in her hand was a very old, well-loved, plastic mermaid Barbie doll with hair sticking up in every which direction because it goes with her everywhere. She was still staring at me.
I looked at her and I said, “Yes. Yes, mermaids are real. In fact, your dad and I see them all the time when we dive doing research. All the time.”
And she just sort of nodded and said like, “Yeah, I thought so,” then walked off. She was really happy and I realized that I just dug a hole and then made it just that little bit deeper.
It happened when we were at Lizard Island which is in the northern part of the Great Barrier Reef on a field trip. She wanted evidence. So she knew we were going out on dives with underwater cameras and things like that. Every time we would come back she would go, “So, did you catch any on film?”
And we would say, “Look, they're really fast. We did not see any this time but maybe next time.”
This kept happening and I could see the trust diminishing and we had to do something. Luckily, we saw Lacey -- this is the crazy-haired Barbie doll -- one day detached from Kiara who I think was having a sleep and we took it out on a dive. We tethered it to the coral reef with fishing line, because it’s see-through underwater, and we got down and we took this amazing photograph of Lacey on the reef.
We got back and we were like, “Hey, Kiki, we got a photo,” and we showed her and she was stoked. Mermaids were real and she was really, really happy. I thought that that’s it. We’re done. But she needed more evidence. That was cool but it didn’t really move.
I went back at work. I was heading out on a different field trip on a tourism ferry out to a pontoon, a tourist pontoon on the reef to do a site inspection because we need to make sure that facilities are up to scratch so they don’t harm the reef if there's a cyclone. I had a camera with me at the time and I was surprised. On the ferry with me was a professional mermaid with her videographer.
She's from Hawaii. She was over visiting to do a video on the reef and I asked her if I could take some footage of her. So I got this underwater video of her swimming along. She had the custom-made tail. It looked legit.
I got home and I showed her and it was fantastic. She was like, “Right. They're real.” It’s done. I was now an authority on mermaids and I was pretty happy about that. Her faith in me was restored.
Then she looked at me again and she said, “So what about unicorns?”
And I was like, “Uh, I’m not really sure about unicorns, sweetie. I’m an ocean person, but I'll check it out.” And I thought, “What horse people do I know? Not many.”
It was around about the time that my husband was doing his PhD and, luckily, he was actually filming underwater. He would put down clumps of seaweed or algae and he would film them, because what he was trying to work out was what fish came and ate the seaweed after a disturbance. So if there's a cyclone or coral bleaching, the first thing that usually starts to grow is either the algae or the coral if it’s there, and they compete. So he was trying to work out what are the important fish and are the herbivores all equal? Are there any important ones?
Being the good wife I said, “Yeah, sure, honey. I'll help you analyze your underwater video. I know how to count fish and identify them.” I was on maternity leave, pregnant with my second child so that was cool.
And 1100 hours later and 120,000 bites later, play-pause, play-pause, we actually worked out that one species took 80% of all the bites on this really large, fleshy macroalgae. And it was the unicorn fish. I thought this is gold. It’s cool.
I showed Kiara the footage and explained to her, “You know, daddy found a unicorn – erm - fish on the reef and it’s really important. It eats the algae and it helps the baby corals grow because it doesn’t take out their homes.”
She thought, “Okay, Daddy’s found sort of a unicorn fish and it’s really important for the reef that I love.” So that was fantastic.
I had my second child and we’re in Fiji and doing some research there. My husband was working with the local community and my daughter and I noticed that the villagers were taking out a lot of unicorn fish to eat. They call it sivisivi over there. From a scientific perspective, I was quite worried for them because they were removing the insurance policy for the reef. If something went wrong they were taking out the things that could help it recover.
Kiki was devastated. She was like, “How can they be taking out the unicorn fish from the reef? It’s really important and it’s pretty and it’s got a horn. You need to make them stop.”
I said, “Well, sweetie, I can tell you what to do but this is their country and their culture and that fish is really important to them and they take it for reasons that are important to them. I can’t just tell them to stop.”
So she thought about it and stomped her little foot and said, “Well, I’m going to write a book.”
I’m, “Okay. Good luck with that.”
But I helped her like a good mom would. It was a picture book. She wasn’t that old. And she did this amazing picture book to try and explain how important the unicorn fish was to the local kids. She called it Super Sivisivi Saves The Reef. It had a cape and it had a big ‘S’ on its chest and things like that, and she felt good. She left the book there and it was great.
I got home and I’m back at work again. I don't know if many of you have been watching the news but in 2016/2017 the Great Barrier Reef has experienced back-to-back bleaching events, which is pretty full-on. There was no break in the impact and the corals have suffered in some parts. I thought to myself, right now, the unicorn fish and other fish that eat the algae are going to be really important for the Great Barrier Reef which is my home.
I had to travel out far north part of the Great Barrier Reef coastline and speak to local fishermen in a pretty remote part of the coastline where they have sort of like I Fish and I Vote stickers on their utes, or pickup trucks as you would say here. I thought, right. I need to talk about the results from recent coral bleaching surveys and talk to them about the importance of what they can do to help the reef. There's no way I’m going to be able to use a picture book with these people. It’s just not going to go down well.
So I get up there, I stand up in front of them, I go through the survey results on a PowerPoint, and I get to the last slide which is about what you can do. And there's one little dot-point about protect herbivores, and I thought, yeah, I might try. I might try something.
I said, “Look, I know you guys love to fish. I don't want you to stop fishing. I know it’s part of your life. But the reef is off. Your mainland here is undergoing some really hard recovery time at the moment and it needs some fish to help it get back there. So there's probably some fish you shouldn’t take. If you could really just stop taking them for six months, that would be awesome. Okay, bye.”
I just wanted to get off the stage because I thought, yeah, it’s probably not going to go down well.
As I was closing, one of the local fishermen said, “So which fish?” I was like, “Oh, they're actually interested. This is great.”
And I said, “Well, there's the unicorn fish and there's some parrot fish and some rabbit fish,” and they wanted to know more. They wanted to know what they look like, what their names were.
I was sort of skirting around telling them please don’t take these specific species and one of the guys in the audience just said, “Bloody hell, Love. Just tell us which fish you don’t want us to take.”
I was amazed. I was like, “Oh, my God. This is actually working.”
The crazy thing out of that meeting is the local community was so worried about what was happening they said, “Well, we need to make a poster. We need to make a poster that shows pictures of the fish that people shouldn’t take, shouldn’t spear off off the reef.”
I look back on it now and I laugh and I think a picture book actually worked for these locals. The amazing thing is that this poster is now in fish shops up and down 2.5 thousand kilometers of the Great Barrier Reef coastline. It makes me really proud to know that we didn’t need to regulate or put in a rule. It was just a chat, it was just pub talk, in a way, and it persuaded people to voluntarily not take these fish.
The other thing that sticks with me is it was okay and I’m really proud that I did make my daughter understand and believe that mermaids are real and unicorns can save the reef.
Thank you.