I’m a marine biologist. Over 20 years I’ve watched our seas change.

The trend is clear. Sixty-five percent of Ireland’s marine and coastal habitats are in poor condition and only 17% of commercially fished stocks are in a healthy state. Since the 1970s Atlantic salmon populations have declined by 90%, European eels by 92%. … The way to recover this Ocean life, and our connection with it, lies in protecting what remains.

Common dolphin mother and calf. ‘Around the vessel the sea was more dolphin than water, the kind of abundance I had heard of only in tales… as though we had steamed out of the present into an ocean of the past’. Photograph: iStock