Can You Name One Marine Protected Area?

Try it. Name a marine protected area in your country.

If you came up blank, you're in good company. Andrew Lewin, who has hosted How to Protect the Ocean for more than a decade, admits he can't name the ones in Canada. Marine protected areas take years of science and consultation to create, then sit behind an invisible line on a map. You can't point a camera at a boundary the way you can at an orca or a great white shark.

Dr. Judy Mann-Lang has spent her career on that problem. She joined Andrew to talk about how aquariums learn what visitors take home, and how one idea in South Africa became MPA Day, now celebrated around the world every 1 August.

From counting growth rings to counting visitors

Judy's master's degree had her staring down a microscope for two years, counting daily growth rings in fish ear bones. Important work, she says, and it wasn't for her. Her passion was people and nature, so she took an education job at the aquarium in Durban and stayed with the organization for 30 years.

She moved from education to fisheries research with fishers, back to education, then to director of uShaka Sea World as it was being built, then CEO. Later she stepped into a role as conservation strategist, which let her finish a part-time PhD on one question: people visit aquariums, so what do they actually learn?

That question pushed her to unite every staff member, from aquarists to accountants, around a single line: helping people to care for the ocean. It also exposed a blind spot. The organization's research team of more than 30 scientists, working on coral reefs, fisheries and MPAs, was what Judy called its best-kept secret. For decades, nothing in the aquarium told visitors it existed.

Visitors who named the aquarium

When Judy's team surveyed visitors about marine protected areas, most couldn't name one. Some named an aquarium instead.

For Judy, it was a lesson in lenses. Many visitors in South Africa arrive with no prior idea of what an aquarium is, and some local languages have no word for one. In the early days, children asked where the switch was to change the channel, or how staff stopped the waves.

When she looked at the aquarium's signs through fresh eyes, she realized they had been written for people like her, people who already know and care about the ocean. The team rebuilt everything in layers. The first layer answers the simplest questions, what am I looking at and why. Deeper layers serve visitors who want more. Floor staff are trained to read who they're talking to and pitch the conversation accordingly.

Penguin Promises

Measuring knowledge gain is relatively simple: survey people before and after. Judy is more interested in whether a visit changes what people do.

In the Penguin Promises project at uShaka Sea World, visitors wrote a pledge to the penguins on a postcard, a behaviour they would change to help the ocean. The team followed up 12 to 18 months later. In the published study, more than half of those who responded could still recall their promise, and about half said they had kept it. When asked why, many pointed to their children or grandchildren, or to an emotional connection with the penguins themselves.

Judy describes the goal as reaching people's hearts, hands and minds. Minds are the easiest to measure. Hearts and hands matter more, because most drivers of biodiversity loss come down to human behaviour.

When the problem is people's livelihoods

Andrew brought in a story he had just covered on his YouTube channel. At Palmyra Atoll in the central Pacific, corals endured more than six months of heat stress in 2023. Researchers later found the reef covered in baby corals, supported by a full food web of sharks, grazing parrotfish and crustose coralline algae. That combination is now guiding restoration work in places including Maui, Belize, Florida and Puerto Rico.

Many of those ecosystem pieces are removed by people, often through fishing. In many coastal regions, fish are the main source of protein. Judy's take after years of work on a sustainable seafood project at Cape Town's V&A Waterfront: sustainable seafood is complicated. Small-scale fishing families are rarely the main problem and are often the ones losing out to large industrial fleets. Communicators need to simplify without pretending the complexity away.

She points to Tsitsikamma, one of South Africa's oldest MPAs, where fish are bigger and more abundant inside the boundary. Judy believes intact ecosystems like this will be the ones best able to withstand the changes ahead.

How MPA Day began

In 2018, South Africa had just 0.4% of its waters in marine protected areas. Scientists had spent more than a decade mapping where new MPAs should go and had consulted everyone from local communities to oil and gas companies. The proposals sat on the minister's desk, and the outlook was worsening.

The new MPAs were finally declared on 1 August 2019, lifting protection of South Africa's mainland waters to 5%. Judy knew the public support behind them was thin. "We can't say love MPAs," she told Andrew, "if people don't know what MPAs are."

There was a day for rhinos and a day for zebras, so she proposed a day for MPAs. Two lessons shaped it. First, explain MPAs through something familiar: South Africans know game reserves, so MPAs became nature reserves in the sea. Second, show what MPAs do for people. South Africa had sold its MPAs on biodiversity and climate, and in a country facing serious socioeconomic challenges, the human benefits needed to come first.

At the aquarium, the most effective piece of the new MPA exhibit was a map of coastal towns with the nearest MPAs marked. Visitors would find their hometown and see the protected area next door. Strange deep-sea corals and coelacanths in the offshore MPAs drew people in too.

From one aquarium to the world

Judy called six or eight friends, including digital agencies, conservation groups and the Two Oceans Aquarium. None of them knew what MPA Day was yet. The first one, held during lockdown, was a virtual tour. This year, Judy counted celebrations in more than 25 countries, and MPA Day 2026 was recognised as a UN Ocean Decade Activity.

Mission Blue's Hope Spots network and the ProtectBaltic team have been anchor partners. Participants now range from individuals and community groups to MPA managers, regional networks, businesses and governments. Some organizations are using the day to lobby for new protection. MPA Day belongs to anyone who wants to use it.

One group hasn't joined yet: zoos and aquariums. Judy is confident they will.

Dealing with eco-anxiety

Andrew closed by asking how non-scientists can cope with the weight of ocean news. Judy has been through her own periods of eco-anxiety and inertia. Her answer is to ask what she can do in her own community, with her family, at the school gate, at work. Small local wins add up. Then get outside and do the thing that inspires you, because keeping your own spirit alive is how you keep the people around you inspired too.

What you can do

Find your nearest MPA. Look up the marine protected area closest to you and one species or habitat it protects.

Mark 1 August. Join or host an MPA Day event, even a beach walk or a classroom lesson. Resources are at mpaday.org.

Talk about it. Tell one person about an MPA they didn't know existed.

Start local. Pick one small action in your own community this month.

Takeaways

• Most people can't name an MPA near them, which makes public support for new protection fragile
• South Africa's 2019 MPA expansion lifted protection of its mainland waters from 0.4% to 5%
• MPA Day began with a virtual tour and now runs in many countries every 1 August
• Explaining MPAs as nature reserves in the sea, and showing their value to people, widened support
• Layered messaging lets aquariums reach first-time visitors and ocean experts at the same exhibit
• In the Penguin Promises study, more than half of respondents recalled their pledge 12 to 18 months later
• Your action: find your closest MPA and plan one thing you'll do on 1 August

Sources

• Save Our Seas Foundation: South Africa announces 20 new marine protected areas
• George Herald: South African-born MPA Day becomes global ocean conservation movement
• NAAEE eePRO summary of Mann, Ballantyne and Packer (2018), Penguin Promises
• KPBS: There are still nearly pristine coral reefs. They're a blueprint for coral restoration
• Daily Maverick: Marine protected areas are our insurance policy
• Blooloop: WAZA Annual Conference 2026