Hannah Rudd has always been a campaigner. “I was that kid putting up posters at school saying tigers are being poached, or running table-top sales for charities,” she says. She grew up with a love of the sea, watching her father sea angling off the East Anglian coast, fascinated by what he reeled in on the end of his line.
Yet at school, careers advisers steered her away from studying the subject she loved, marine science. “No one does that, they said. Be more practical.” Luckily for us, Hannah has pursued her passion and is now on a mission to share her knowledge and understanding of marine life in the hope of rescuing the world's endangered seas and oceans.
Hannah is based in Bury St Edmunds, but she grew up on the Blackwater estuary in Essex. It was there she discovered her love of water and everything the lives in it. She chose to study geography at university, but opted out after being inspired by a woman presenting the TV programme Shark Week. She decided to make that her career.
“She looked like me, she was British and she was working in South Africa, so I booked to be a volunteer to join her.” There, Hannah discovered two-thirds of the scientific community were female, yet they hadn’t been given any profile.
While in Cape Town, Hannah studied great white sharks. Now she is predominantly a shark scientist. “I think sharks are misunderstood - and as a teenager I felt a little misunderstood. I could see synergies between their story and mine. The more I delved into their story, and how persecuted they were, the more they fascinated me.”
And, back in Suffolk, she doesn't have to go far to study them. There is, she says, a vast diversity of land and seascape, flora and fauna which we should be exploring close to home. “I didn’t realise, when I was younger, how many opportunities there were to study marine life in the UK like oysters, crabs, lobsters, all those types of species. I thought a marine biologist was someone who worked abroad in places like Thailand. I came back home and realised we have the same ecosystems here.
"We’ve got enormous megafauna on our front doorstep – dolphins, whales, sharks, one of the biggest grey seal colonies in the world, and an amazing variety of seabirds.” The spectacular kelp forests, intricate rocky reefs, sand dunes and salt marshes, mud plains and open ocean all around the British Isles present a range of marine ecosystems worthy of any nature documentary or diving tourism, she says.
Suffolk has one of the finest nature reserves in the UK at RSPB Minsmere, plus the Orford Inshore Marine Conservation Zone, and the county’s coastline is an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty which attracts millions of visitors every year.
“If we add value to these animals and environments and form a connection with them, we are more likely to protect them,” she says. “We can take learning from all over the world to ensure it is done responsibly and sustainably.
Wanting to share her knowledge and experience, in the hope that many more will share her passion, she has written a highly readable, accessible, illustrated guide to marine life called Britain’s Living Seas: Our Coastal Wildlife and How We Can Save It. She hopes that if we understand more about our sea and appreciate its beauty and complexity we will cherish it, rather than plunder it.
“The book is me shouting from the rooftops everything I want to tell you about our oceans. I want to introduce all the wonderful things there are about the sea.” Hannah was approached to write it after her blogs were spotted on social media. She is also now building a career as a marine expert on TV and radio, as well as presenting a programme called Strange Evidence for the Discovery Channel.
At the same time she is continuing her studies into blue sharks off the Cornish coast, while living in Bury St Edmunds and working as a policy and advocacy manager for the Angling Trust. “As an early career marine scientist, I want to get people to fall in love with the sea, and to value it,” she says. “I want to show how amazing it is.
“Whether you watch a documentary or walk along your stretch of coastline, you can’t fail to be entranced by its pure beauty and intrinsic value, yet our relationship with the sea hasn’t always been the most amicable, and it’s under threat. Because the ocean is so enormous, it often feels like we can’t do anything to help.”
Two-thirds of the planet is under water and yet more than 90 per cent of the oceans have not been mapped, she says. “It's obviously a very difficult environment to study. It's one of the harshest environments to conduct any scientific work - it's incredibly expensive, there's a high risk in terms of human health and safety, and loss of equipment, and it can be very difficult to access a lot of these areas.”
But it’s vital that we learn more about the sea before we exploit it further, she says. Fishing, deep sea mining and pollution are huge threats, all of which she highlights in the book. “It’s not an exaggeration to say that if the ocean dies, we die. It is our lifeblood. We depend on it. But people can’t see what’s going on with the sea.
“We’re bombarded with information about how we’re ruining our environment, but not so often given the solutions. I want to highlight things like marine protected areas, nature-based solutions, community action, citizen science. These things are going on but are not getting the spotlight they need.”
The ocean can be one of our biggest allies in climate change, says Hannah. “It is one of the largest carbon sinks on the planet. We think of the Amazon forest as being the planet’s lungs, but actually it’s the ocean – our lungs are blue, not green.
“There’s still so much to be learned about this environment.” When we know more about the surface of the moon than we do about the ocean, Hannah hopes her book will encourage us all to find out just a little bit more.
Britain’s Living Seas by Hannah Rudd is published by Bloomsbury.
