Fearing that she would be the researcher writing an obituary for sawfishes, Ruth Leeney turns her attention from Africa to Papua New Guinea in her search for these quasi-mythical creatures. They’re no myth, she finds with relief, yet their standing in local culture seems to have become as shaky as their survival in real life.

How we choose to see the sea has profound consequences for the way we will protect it. While statistics and mathematical models give us vital projections of the state of our oceans, there is a case for knowing the oceans in all the intricacy and familiarity of the natural history tradition. Lauren De Vos talks to conservationists about getting to know the ocean on its own terms.