Lamakera

And I think after we secured our first grant, really, like, the question that we have is just simple, like, how long people have been fishing the sharks, how dependent they are, how much is the shark really valued.

Like, is it more of the, you know, like, economy or, like, food security or livelihoods, and what's the shark to them? And, and lastly, it's about is it cultural and if, if conservation is, is possible to them because my, my work in Alor drawn from my past experience working in Lamakera, where manta ray fishing is a very political, uh, and historical identity of people in Lamakera.

So conservation is definitely one of the most challenging thing to implement in, in the region, and it's the same question that we brought to Alor, like, is it cultural? And if it's cultural, like, is it possible for us to do conservation? And I think that once we went there and spent about two years staying and, and, and listening and understanding the community, we, we just started to discover a lot more things about the sharks and about the people.

Even, like, we, we never thought about doing some ecological studies, uh, in, in the area, but we just realized that there's a lot of pregnant sharks present in the area.