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Conservation can be complex, controversial, and polarizing. But it can also bring together different people from very diverse backgrounds who all want to make a difference.
Jim Ritterhoff knows this to be true: As the leader of Force Blue, a marine conservation nonprofit that employs ex-Special Operations soldiers, he believes conservation work can serve a higher, human good beyond just rewilding an island, or restoring a species to health. “I feel like we have a crisis of belonging in the world right now,” Ritterhoff says.
We sat down recently with Ritterhoff, Shanna Challenger, and Laura-Li Jeannot. Challenger is part of the Environmental Awareness Group and is a conservation biologist from Antigua and Barbuda. Her work focuses on protecting endangered species and rewilding these islands. Jeannot, of Lancaster University, is a Ph.D. researcher aiming to understand how variations in seabird-derived nutrients have an impact on critically understudied fish communities.
Together, they talked about why tents can be essential tools for marine conservation, and how rewilding work can inspire even the most unlikely partners.
Laura-Li Jeannot, can you tell us a little bit about your work?
Laura-Li Jeannot: I’m a second year Ph.D. student and an early career scientist. That gives me the advantage of diving into the topics that interest me the most, and one of these topics is coral reef fish. I was always fascinated by their complexity, beauty, unique role in ecosystems, and the people that depend on them. In my work, I’m looking at the Chagos Archipelago, which is in the Indian Ocean, and on some of the islands you have uniquely dense populations of seabirds that congregate there. And they are thriving. They build nests, they raise chicks, lay their eggs, and produce massive amounts of guano. And this guano is full of nutrients that make their way to soils, to plants, and more unexpectedly perhaps, into the marine environments. There, these nutrients serve to fertilize the algaes and corals, and even feed the fish, promoting growth and recovery after disturbances and keeping the reef systems healthy.
But unfortunately, in some of the Chagos Islands, there are invasive species. Rats are perhaps the most invasive species in that they practically destroy the ecosystem they enter into. They eat the seabird chicks, the eggs, and sometimes even the adult birds. Another threat to the seabirds on some of the islands is habitat destruction, and on tropical islands that often means coconut plantations. It might look like a beautiful view to us, but to a seabird it’s a nightmare to try and roost and build a nest in these trees.
Although we live in an era of unprecedented biodiversity loss, there are still things to be found.
So how does all of this impact the coral reef fish?
Jeannot: Right, let’s go back to the fish. The fish benefit from seabird nutrients. But there’s a special category of fish I want to talk about, and that’s cryptobenthic fish. “Crypto” means cryptic, so that means they are hidden away and difficult to see, and then “benthic” comes from benthos, which means the seafloor. So that’s what they are: Little tiny fish that hide in the corals on the seafloor, among the coral crevices and trenches and in tiny holes. Aside from their small size, they have another trait in common which is that they live very fast. They are very tiny, very unassuming, and almost transparent, and they hold the world record for the shortest lived vertebrate on Earth. They live about two months, during which they hatch from their egg, find a mate, reproduce, lay their eggs, and die. These fish are the fuel of coral reef systems. What happens to these fish determines what happens to the coral reef community.
One of the few things we know about cryptobenthic fish is that they are very sensitive to local environmental changes, including the nutrients they receive and in particular, seabird nutrients. In my work, we’re trying to determine how seabird nutrients and changes in seabird populations affect these fish and, in turn, the larger fish that feed on them.
A practical outcome from this would be to guide conservation action to where it’s most efficient. For example, rat eradication and restoring seabird habitat would likely benefit the cryptobenthic communities. So if we target these populations of fish, we might be able to have an even bigger impact on larger islands and they might benefit from these healthy fish populations, too.
How do you study such tiny fish?
Jeannot: We take a camping tent underwater. And then underneath the tent, we put a solution with clove essential oil in it which acts like a fish anesthetic. And so all the fish affected by the anesthetic fall out at the bottom of the tent and we can pick them up with little tweezers and bring them back to the surface to count and study. That’s how we get an accurate picture of the community that lives in any one area of the reef.
Doing this can lead to some fascinating discoveries. For example, I was at Fregate Island in the Seychelles, and we found this tiny translucent fish that’s about two centimeters long and the species has never been recorded or described before. It might be a brand new species. So although we live in an era of unprecedented biodiversity loss, there are still things to be found and discovered and admired. That’s worth fighting for.
Turning now to Shanna Challenger—can you tell us more about the Environmental Awareness Group and your work in the Caribbean?
Shanna Challenger: I work for the Environmental Awareness Group, and we are Antigua and Barbuda’s longest-standing environmental NGO. We’ve been working for the benefit of people and wildlife for over 30 years. Now, Environmental Awareness is our name, but conservation is our game. And I want to talk about the conservation work we’ve been doing in the Caribbean.
Our conservation story began on Great Bird Island. On this small island off the northeast coast of our country, we began our conservation efforts in 1995 to try and save a critically endangered snake, the Antiguan racer. This harmless and daring reptile was found all across Antigua and Barbuda, but the invasive species that came in during colonization made their numbers plummet. At one point, their numbers were so low, they were actually declared extinct. But then, 50 individuals were found on the Great Bird Island. And so the Environmental Awareness Group and its partners decided to try and save this species from extinction and embarked on the first rat eradication in the Eastern Caribbean, starting on Great Bird Island.
serg_dibrova / Shutterstock.
What happened when you got rid of the rats?
Challenger: The racers doubled in numbers, and that was great. But then we realized that the lizards they feed on, the birds that are around there, the vegetation … everything started to thrive. We thought to ourselves: Could we do it again? And we have. Since 1995, we have rewilded 16 additional offshore islands that are mainly made of coral. But we wanted to upscale what we were doing. And that’s when we turned to Redonda.
Redonda is the third island of Antigua and Barbuda. It is about 35 miles away from Antigua, and it’s only a mile long, but it was once filled with biodiversity despite the cliffs disappearing into the sea and smothering the surrounding coral reefs. So despite looking like a moonscape and not having much biodiversity left, it was still designated as a key biodiversity area and an important bird area because even though there were very few trees there were still seabirds, including masked boobies that nest there. Aside from these birds, there are also a number of critically endangered and endemic reptiles found nowhere else on the planet, including the Redonda tree lizard, which, as you can imagine, was having a hard time on the island seeing as it didn’t have any trees left. The cause of all this? Invasive alien species.
What species were causing problems?
Challenger: This time, it wasn’t just rats, it was also a herd of goats. We believe that these goats were introduced to Redonda during the seabird guano mining era, because there was once a mine there that took the guano, which is high in nitrogen, and sold it for use in different industries, such as for making fertilizer. Once the rats and goats were established, they completely took over and decimated the vegetation, the seabirds, and more.
So we thought to ourselves: Can we rewild this island? We sent a team of staff and volunteers to stay for two months on this island and put down rat bait. Within a year, we saw an increase in the vegetation biomass and the diversity of plant species that were there. We also saw an impact on the wildlife, including an increase in the seabirds nesting there; the lizards liked it, too. We also looked at the marinescape around Redonda. And in September 2023 we got the Redonda ecosystem reserve declared as a protected area spanning about 74,000 acres.
Since then, we’ve been able to track hawksbill turtles that have come to Great Bird Island to nest and then see that they spend their time foraging around Redonda.
And, Jim Ritterhoff, can you explain what Force Blue is, and introduce yourself?
Jim Ritterhoff: I’m the executive director and one of the cofounders of Force Blue. It is the only nonprofit organization, that we know of anyway, that retrains and redeploys former Special Operations veterans, all of whom are military trained combat divers, to work alongside scientists and environmentalists on marine conservation missions.
We think of our mission as a two-part mission. One is to heal the ocean. And the second is to heal ourselves.
What got you interested in conservation?
Ritterhoff: Perhaps, like me, you grew up watching the show, The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau. For me, it was an inspiration to want to get into the ocean and get involved in marine conservation. But something that few people know about Jacques Cousteau and his crew, is that they were all trained as part of the Commando Hubert, which were the French frogmen. That’s how Jacques Cousteau learned to dive. So we are taking that same idea of using the same skill set for marine conservation.
And since we began in 2016 and in the seven years since, we have deployed dozens of Special Operations veterans on more than 30 impact missions around the United States and throughout the Caribbean. We’ve been involved in projects like kelp reforestation in California, working with marine mammals, doing surveys of sea turtles, and even removing invasive snails from rivers in Arizona. Where there’s water and an environmental need, we have a team of highly skilled individuals who can hop in and get the job done.
That sounds like a big undertaking.
Ritterhoff: One of the things I’m most proud of is that, in the last six years, we’ve enlisted some big private sector partners, including the National Football League, Pepsico, and Publix supermarkets. These are companies that got involved in marine conservation because of our story. The veteran angle can be the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down for a lot of people who might not be initially interested in marine conservation.
Something that’s really synonymous with all veterans’ experiences is a loss of identity when you leave the service. The darkness can start to feel like it’s tearing you apart. You go to places of sacrifice and suffering. A team and a mission can help you get past all of that. The scientists and marine biologists on the front line here, they are under-resourced. But as a military force with a sense of mission and purpose, we can bring our skills to bear and focus less on veteran problems, and more on veteran potential.
We think of our mission as a two-part mission. One is to heal the ocean. And the second is to heal ourselves.
What role do zoos, aquariums, and museums play in your work, and how could they play a role in the future?
Ritterhoff: When we were out in Arizona doing the invasive snail project, we teamed up with the OdySea Aquarium in Scottsdale. Every time we deploy, the first question we ask is “who is the scientific partner?” and then we can find the issue that needs to be addressed.
The kelp forest project we did in California was with an aquarium that is in the Los Angeles Harbor. And we’ve partnered with the NFL for the last five Super Bowls to find marine conservation projects in the local area the game is happening in.
Our first question is always who, in the local area, are the subject matter experts? Who has a project we can get involved in? We’re nothing without our scientific partners. We’re not scientists; we are a high skilled workforce of underwater operators that can get a job done. But we need the scientists to collaborate with us.
Just going further into the work of public aquariums, we know that millions of people go to zoos and aquariums each year. That’s a phenomenal number of people. And partnering with them can get projects a lot of exposure, right?
Jeannot: Cryptobenthic fish are perfect subjects for aquariums. They’re so colorful and so pretty and there is so much we might learn about coral ecosystems just by knowing slightly more about them. Gathering public interest about these critters would be the first step to getting people interested in doing the work and getting more funding. We need new research ventures to try and find new species and understand their underlying mechanisms. Aquariums are a great place to go for this.
Challenger: Antigua and Barbuda don’t have any zoos or aquariums. But we do rely heavily on partnerships to get our work done. Re:wild, to name one. We have people in the country to do the work, but we do need to tap into others’ expertise sometimes. In conservation, having these collaborations and partnerships is crucial. I don’t think rewilding Redonda, for example, would have been done if it were left up to the government, and it couldn’t have been done by my organization alone, either. We relied on the private sector, the community, and other partners to see that come to fruition.
One thing I think is really important here is education that connects local groups to the work you’re doing and making it part of their curriculum, as it were. Can you tell us more about that?
Challenger: Environmental awareness is in our name, it’s what we do. We have a project called a floating classrooms initiative, for example. So in Antigua and Barbuda, we have hundreds of beaches, but a lot of Antiguans can’t swim. A lot of people have never been on a boat before. So the floating classroom takes students out of the regular classroom and to the water. So they can touch, smell, taste, feel these ecosystems, feel the species that are there and have these lasting experiences that can, we hope, change their hearts and minds.
One of our key collaborations is with the Ministry of Education. Our information and work on our offshore islands is now in the primary school curriculum. This knowledge is going to a new generation.
We believe we need to empower Antiguans and Barbudans with this information so that they can be part of the conservation effort and that way we won’t have to rely on others’ expertise. We want the next generation of conservationists to paint a vibrant masterpiece of hope, resilience, and community stewardship for their ecosystems.
I’m curious, what new ideas have you heard or seen recently as a great idea that you can employ on your own project?
Ritterhoff: One thing I found really interesting is conservation conflict transformation theory, because I feel like it’s inherent to the premise of Force Blue. We have this amazing ability to reach across the aisle, even in this hyper-partisan, political world that we all live in, whether it’s in the U.S. or elsewhere around the world. The conservation conflict transformation framework really offers a way to think about disarming the “no” camp that doesn’t want to deal with what we’re talking about. It resonated a lot with me.
Challenger: One idea I really resonated with was that for some conservation projects with seabirds on islands, you need to do more than eradicate rats or whatever invasive species—you need to also reintroduce the birds. And then, showing how an atoll or an offshore island is connected to the mainland, that is very important. It can be hard showing people who live on the mainland why the offshore islands matter, so if we can show how they influence their lives, that will help change hearts and minds.
What we share is a belief in serving the planet and making the world a better place.
Jeannot: Something I’ve been thinking about is the importance of failure. We’re so focused on successes and being able to tell a story where you win or you achieve something and you’ve done something very important. And it is important to share those wins. But to get to that point, you need to fail many times. And these failures aren’t showcased enough.
There’s so much you can learn from failure and failing repeatedly. In science, we often only publish research where we achieve something or find something new. But what happens when you try something and it doesn’t work and there is no new result? Often, these studies don’t get published but there might be other young researchers that are interested in trying the same thing and of course, they end up failing, too, because they had no idea someone had already tried it and failed. And that’s such a waste of time and resources. We need to be able to showcase our failures, because what we’re trying to achieve is so important.
Can you share any unique ways or ideas to get the word out about the projects you and other conservationists are doing?
Ritterhoff: Every time we deploy we bring a camera crew. If you don’t document it, it didn’t happen. And our story is unique enough, we can usually get eyeballs.
But about every two years or so I get a call from someone who wants to do a TV show about Force Blue because it sounds sexy: Special Operations veterans doing marine conservation work! But then I start to tell them what we actually do: coral outplanting, invasive species removal, or marine debris removal. And they are like, “So no guns in Somalia or Malaysia and chasing the fish bombers?” They miss the point: The point is not to put our guys back in conflict. It’s to help them, after years of being in conflict, transition out and continue to serve and do something good for the planet.
Can you tell us if other Caribbean countries are getting involved in the work you are doing, using Antigua and Barbuda as a model?
Challenger: Yes, for example, Anguilla, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, and a number of others have been inspired by the work that’s happening, not just because it’s happening in our region, but it is also Caribbean people doing the work.
A silver lining of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 was that we had to really stop relying on people coming from overseas. Luckily for my organization, we had this local conservation capacity and our work never stopped.
We also offer regional exchanges. For example, recently members of the St. Lucia National Trust came over to help with our Antiguan racer snake census.
Can you tell us about your work with scientists and the knowledge exchange that you have with scientists?
Ritterhoff: We always have a scientific partner when we go on a mission, but beyond just teaching them something or sharing something, we try to build community. I am reminded of a turtle researcher we worked with. He wrote me a letter to say thank you, and he talked about how he teaches STEM at a university and the kids don’t listen to him, and he writes papers that he thinks no one reads, and he said that we reminded him as to why he got into conservation in the first place. What we share is a belief in serving the planet and making the world a better place, but also we want to give people a sense of belonging to something bigger than themselves. Give people a mission for good, and it is intoxicating. 
Lead image: Boule / Shutterstock
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