Why we let sea creatures speak for themselves
People protect what they care about, and they care about who they know. So we decided to let the sea introduce itself.
Most of us will never meet a monk seal or see a seahorse in the wild. Facts and figures about them are easy to scroll past. A voice is harder to ignore. That is the idea behind Reloceans: short videos in which a sea creature tells you, in its own words, how it lives and what makes life harder.
Meet the crew
Our first six characters all live in the Mediterranean:
- Carla, a loggerhead sea turtle who returns to the beach where she hatched to lay her eggs.
- Mo, a Mediterranean monk seal, one of the rarest seals on Earth.
- Finn, a bottlenose dolphin who finds food and friends by sound.
- Pip, a seahorse dad who carries the babies.
- Ollie, an octopus who can squeeze through almost any gap.
- Gus, a slow-growing dusky grouper.
Animated characters, real science
Our characters are animated with AI, and we label every video that way. What they say is not made up. Every fact comes from a source we can name, and no character is shown doing something its species doesn't really do. Take Mo: the most recent estimate puts the whole Mediterranean monk seal population at roughly 815 to 997 animals.
“You've probably never seen me. There are very few of us left.”
One small ask at a time
Every story ends with one thing you can do: keep nesting beaches dark at night, slow your boat near dolphins, anchor on sand instead of seagrass. Small habits, repeated by many people, change a coastline.
New stories arrive on Instagram every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and here on the blog every couple of days.