1. Cephalopod: A type of marine animal characterized by a large head, tentacles, and a soft body, such as an octopus.

2. Podcasts: Digital audio files available on the internet for streaming or downloading, typically in a series format.

3. Replenish: To restore or refill, especially in the context of renewing fish or natural resources.

4. Coral Bleaching: A phenomenon where coral reefs lose their color due to environmental stress, often caused by rising sea temperatures.

5. Ngos: Non-Governmental Organizations, typically independent entities that operate for the betterment of society or a specific cause.

6. Sustainability: The ability to maintain or endure over the long term without causing significant environmental or social harm.

7. Cephalopod Gleaners: People who gather or collect cephalopods (such as octopuses) through careful observation and collection methods.

8. Reflats: Areas of a beach or coastline that are exposed at low tide.

9. Pelagic: Referring to organisms or activities that occur in the open sea rather than near the shore.

10. Dina: A system of local bylaws or regulations used for community-based resource management in Madagascar.

11. Conflict Resolution: The process of resolving disputes or disagreements between individuals or groups in a peaceful manner.

12. No Take Zone: An area where no extraction or fishing is allowed, designed to protect marine ecosystems and biodiversity.

13. Regenerating: The process of renewal, regrowth, or restoration, especially concerning natural resources or ecosystems.

14. Agitate: To stir up or disturb, often used in the context of water or marine environments.

15. Lifeline: A crucial support or resource that is vital for the survival or well-being of a community.

16. Underserved: Lacking adequate attention, support, or resources, often in reference to marginalized or neglected communities.

17. Near Shore: The region of the sea close to the shore or coastline.

18. Agency: The capacity of an individual or community to act independently and make choices.

19. Brunt: The main force or impact of a specific situation, often used to describe the heaviest burden or responsibility.

20. Renewable: Capable of being replenished or regenerated, typically referring to energy sources that are environmentally sustainable.

Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service, where we report the world, however difficult the issue, however hard to reach. Podcasts from the BBC World Service are supported by advertising. Tired of ads barging into your favourite news podcasts? Good news ad free listening on Amazon Music is included with your prime membership. Just head to Amazon ad freenewspodcasts to catch up on the latest episodes without the ads. Enjoy thousands of acad shows ad free for ponch subscribers. Some shows may have that. Hey, I’m Ryan Reynolds. At Mint Mobile, we like to do the opposite of what big wireless does. They charge you a lot. We charge you a little. So naturally, when they announced they’d be raising their prices due to inflation, we decided to deflate our prices due to not hating you. That’s right, we’re cutting the price of mint unlimited from $30 a month to just $15 a month. Give it a try@mintMobile.com. Switch $45 upfront for three months, plus taxes and fees. Promote for new customers. For limited time unlimited, more than 40gb per month flows full terms@mintmobile.com. Lives less Ordinary is the podcast from the BBC World Service, bringing you extraordinary personal stories from around the globe. Search for lives less ordinary wherever you get your BBC podcasts from the BBC World Service. I’m Hazel Healy, and this is an octopus’s garden for the documentary. We are at the beach and there’s this woman, Fisher. She noticed there’s an octopus in the crevice and she squats at it. She puts her hand inside just to be able to tell how deep it is. She has her stick that she will use just to lure it out. I think it has burrowed fat deeper into the hole. She puts the wooden stick to the side and uses her hand. And as I watch, I’m nervous, because I know sometimes you can get injured trying to battle with an intelligent animal like an octopus. You’re on a remote reef on the east coast of Africa. It’s very hot here and too dry to grow most crops, so you depend on the sea for everything. Your grandparents and great grandparents were octopus fishers. And now you too, know about this incredible cephalopod, about its wily ways, the rocky dens it hides in and how much you depend on it to feed your family. So she squats and starts to whistle. I’m not hopeful that she’ll get the octopus. Then I start seeing the tentacles creeping up. She continues to whistle. It’s so soft and melodious, it feels like she is giving gratitude to the octopus. The tentacles go farther up her elbows and in no time she pulls it out and she stabs at it and changes colour from bright pink, slowly turning into white. It has lost the battle. The woman smiles, raises her hands in gratitude, and starts to walk across the Indian Ocean. In some of the most isolated and far flung places on earth, millions of people depend on a catch like this. In Madagascar, that fully grown octopus will buy three kilos of rice or 15 kilos of dried cassava, enough to feed a whole family for a week. But in recent years, overfishing and the effects of climate change, including coral bleaching and high winds, have steadily emptied these waters of octopus. This is the story of an innovative underwater experiment which is trying to replenish octopus catches. It hinges on putting fishing communities in charge of managing and sustaining their own resources. My name is Michael Strogoff. I come from the Vezu people off the southwest coast of Madagascar. This is my village, Ambatimilu. The Vezu people have lived in this coastline for hundreds of years and we are expert octopus gleaners. So we’re selling octopus because it’s the most valuable fishery we have. Eventually, the octopus will end up in somebody’s plate in Europe or in America. But there is a lot of pressure on the octopus, so we’ve found a solution to save these fisheries. With support from local leaders and ngos, Michael’s community began to look at the ways octopus fishing was changing in order to better understand these know. In the past, there were many natural forms of resource management. Paul Antion is a marine conservationist and octopus management lead who works in Madagascar with the charity Blue Ventures. So if you look at how this octopus fishery was collected in the know, these are very rural communities where it takes a lot for a truck to get up there, a collection truck, so they would only go every spring tide, so around the full moon and the new moon, and that’s when the tide would get low enough to go out walking along the reflats cleaning. So that in and of itself was a management measure, because every other week you had a bit of rest for the fishery, and as time has gone on, as you’ve had increase in number of competition for those resources, collection is happening every day. So there’s a constant pressure now. And also in the past, when a certain area would become scarce, fishers would just move to a new area. So you had these different types of management measures that were happening somewhat naturally, drawing inspiration from those traditional forms of resource management. In May 2004, one village decided to try something. They would temporarily close off a small area 130 reef from all fishing for three months it was left completely alone. When they opened the reef again, fishers like Louis Malimo were pleasantly surprised. There was Allah fish. Allah octopus. I usually cut five kilos of octopus on a good day. On the opening day of the octopus closer we able to cut 60 kilos, 80 kilos product. That was a perfect day for harvesting octopus. This is a group of people who didn’t really need to come together, who fish as individuals. Agatha Agada is a marine ecologist and conservation leader who works in Kenya and Somalia. She’s been inspired by this experiment. They knew that their fisheries were almost completely depleted and they had this idea to congregate as a team and see how do we improve our fisheries, because in a few years we will end up not having food. I think if you had asked people who set up the first closure, they wouldn’t have imagined this continuing seeing is believing. And when you have people come and participate and catch 1020 times what they’re catching on a daily basis, it sparked this desire from these other villages to do the same thing. Giving an area, giving a species a time to rest, especially such a quick growing species and quickly reproducing species as the octopus, that it could produce amazing yields in a short period of time. What species are we talking about here? That’s found in Madagascar? Yeah, it’s octopus cyania, the day octopus. You can find it on the reef flat, mostly hidden in little dens. Fisher’s very good at finding those dens by seeing the different shell configurations around these holes. Like majority of octopus, it’s very quickly growing, reproduce quickly. In just one month they. They can double in size. So it makes for an easy species to, to manage to improve economic outcomes for fishers. Octopus cyania can be fished close to shore at low tide without the need for a boat. This has meant that women like Norina nestine have long been the driving force of this fishery in Madagascar. This is the spear that I bring into the sea to glean the octopus. Octopuses have a multiple colours, and once I see one, as the octopus tried to grab the spear, all of the tanticoles comes out. It’s April in Madagascar. The wind is up, the weather is getting cooler, and octopus catches a naturally dwindling, which is hard for norena maha chara. I catch ten kilos of octopus. On a good day yesterday, I only caught two kilo of octopus. Sometimes don’t catch anything at all. If there’s no catch, Norina can rely on seaweed farming, but many don’t have an alternative income, and food often runs short. A lot of people here in my village have a problem of hunger because of a climate change. As the wind gust comes, very often people can’t really go fishing. I see some, my community boiling hot water to keep the energy, but to see children don’t eat, it’s frustrating. Not only is the harsh weather making fishing difficult, but by May, it’s also time for community leaders like Marshalin Stefan to consult with his village about whether to roll out another octopus closure. Firstly, when we decide to make a closer, we have invite all community to participate in decision making. Here in my village, they are really supportive. That’s why we keep on going. But there are people who disagreed. So to resolve this issue, we have to educate them. And they are now a part of the system, also happy with the system of this octopus closure. It can’t be easy just to take away people’s access to income, to their livelihoods, really, even for a short time. How do people navigate this? It’s entirely up to fishers themselves to decide where to close off and again, for how long. But there are certain people who don’t want to close off an area. And you also have conflicts between villages, villages that use the same area, villages that decide not to close an area of their own, yet want to partake in the opening of another village. You have conflicts as well around price, with collectors, the private sector. So, yeah, there are quite a few different conflicts that come up. It’s June now, and out on the reef, the octopus are growing bigger. Their soft bodies mean they can hide in impossibly small nooks and crannies, but they’re still vulnerable. The fishers have now chosen their designated closure area. It’s marked with strings of plastic bottles tied together with red flags. But marshalin knows that more protection will be needed. I choose some men to look after the closer. But during this patrol, people are sometimes really tricky. They enter inside of this closure, so the patrol have to act smart. We also work with those local collector monitor where the cuts come from. This is how we patrol it. If someone is to be caught fishing during the closure period, they’re able to put in place. These local bylaws carry out sanctions through this process, which is called Dina. For instance, in one of the villages just recently, the first thing they do is take all of the catch that the person has caught and then they also take away the materials that were being used. So if someone was using a spear, for instance, they take away the spear and then as the trial comes to fruition, if the person is found guilty, then they would pay around 100,000 rear, which is $25 per person. So these differ throughout all the villages. Each village or each LMMA has its own dina. The difficulty that we face when we do, the closer that a lot of people compliining because of lack of income and also sometimes we cannot really afford to cover our own food. By July, the waiting is taking its toll. Fishers like Daisa Ellison must try and clean octopus elsewhere to feed his family. Some people can get desperate. The frustration of poverty makes people take the decision to go in the closure. It’s hard for us to apply the law because they are sometime a part of my family. If the ocean is your source of life, you get by, but you also try to adapt. So, like right now, the pressure in the ocean is quite immense. And there are not so many opportunities for the youth from these communities. So for them to reprieve and provide some livelihood, they all go into the ocean. It becomes a space for comfort. What is it that makes for success? Are there places where they’ve tried it and they’re never going to do it again? Does it depend on a community’s conflict resolution capacity? Are there any ingredients that you’ve seen that make for success or a smoother closing and opening? Yeah. So much of the success of a closure comes from the strength of the community leaders and their ability to organise, their ability to watch over the closure. That really depends on where the closure is. So for certain villages, the reef flat is right in front of the village, whereas other villages could be five kilometres away. So a lot more difficult to see whether or not people are entering. Some villages have had access to alternative livelihoods. I think those are the major ingredients for a successful closure. I’m Hazel Healy and this is the documentary an octopus’s garden from the BBC World Service. It’s in August now, so we have a two months close here and we are starting looking for September tide that we can plan for opening day, which is a big day for us. If the fishers can wait out that extra month. From August to September, the octopus can double in size from 700 grammes to 1400. Come October, fishers can triple their income. On a calm, bright day in September, the community gathers on the beach. Some will fish, some will collect data on this year’s yields, and others will transport the octopus ready for sale. And as Deza explains, there are rituals to carry out too. First things we do on the opening day of the closure, we have to ask a blessing from our ancestor to have a lot of cats. We gather together at the beach and every boat is lined up on the beach and there will be a whistle. So on the third whistle, everyone paddle out of the reef at the same time to. The site, the fast closure I went to, everyone was happy to run into the ocean and get as much octopus as they could. And what’s remarkable about it is how quickly words spread. So with this one that I just came to, there was more of a system. There were 20 people allowed into the reef at a time. And the reason for this is to make sure that as the reef is regenerating, you don’t crush the corals that are coming up. In the quest of getting the most octopus, the sea is seen as something that’s open and available for everyone. We’ve tried to implement different systems. So a badge system, for instance, where people with a badge can go or designate a few of the best fishers, fishermen and fisher women, and then the catch be spread out evenly across the village. Certain villages have come up with ideas themselves, so if they see people from other villages come in, they ask them to pay a fee, for instance, to be able to go fish. Because if you’re really trying to improve the outcome for the person who is sacrificing during that time, then you definitely need to have some sort of regulation on the opening day. Back at the beach, daisa has done well. I saw a lot of fish species, such as a rabbit fish, a lot of squeed, definitely a lot of October. They’ve started to see the fisheries come back. For instance, lobster shells, pelagic fish that haven’t been seen close to shore in years are now coming back close to shore because of these areas of high health. So it’s really leading to these fisheries improvements, as well as improving the overall habitat and overall ecosystem health. And now the closures have sparked another small revolution, this time in conservation. Two years ago, a community decided to cordon off a section of the ocean for good, creating what’s called a no take zone. For the first few months, one fisher actually went to live on the beach to watch over the area. We’re talking a really, really small no take zone, two to 10, most viable for a community to close off. And within nine months, went from being four fish per 100 metre squared to over 300 fish per 100 metres squared in this small no take zone, which is being monitored consistently by a local monitoring team. And since seeing that success, they’re now around ten again, they’re very small notic zones, so it’s not closing off a massive bit of ocean, but it’s enough to make an impact and to inspire others to do the same. Madagascar’s closure system has travelled too, all over Indonesia, from Sumatra to Silawezi and across the western Indian Ocean from the coast of Mozambique up to Kenya. That’s the main inspiring thing. Local communities having their own solutions and coming up with structures that is agreeable and acceptable to them to allow for them to celebrate the benefits from managing their resource. This is something that we have borrowed and used for Kenya. Agatha observed firsthand how fishers from Kenya were moved to recreate features of the Madagascar closures, in particular the starring role of women. When the communities from Kenya came back to Kenya, the first thing that came to their mind is like, okay, they have women fishes, and women are empowered from the octopus fisheries. Why don’t we do the same for women? And when they started with their octopus closure, they decided to dedicate one for the women, so that the women can be empowered, but also contribute to building the community. Since the little things women do is sometimes seen as subtle, but this was going to help enunciate it a little bit. And the women have been able to be more vocal. And now all the closures they have are now managed by women. Would it be fair to say octopus can only go so far to solving a lot of these complex problems that communities face, particularly with climate changing? Yeah, these communities are quite underserved in terms of just basic human needs. So access to health care, education, access to water, access to fair markets. So they do have access to this lifeline in the ocean. But, yes, I’d say that you can only go so far with octopus. The future of these temporary closures will be to inspire others to implement more permanent near shore. No, take zones that really give fishers a sense of ownership and belief that they’ll be able to continue fishing there for future generations. Projects like this can offer some protection against hunger in neglected corners of the world and put power and agency back into the hands of communities who are bearing the brunt of our warming world. My message is to everyone who lives on the coastline, who has coral reef, who has octopus, we should make this closer because it helps to regrow our resources. You will get benefit from it. This is what we have learned and what we have to tell. But we not stop there. We gonna carry on. You’ve been listening to an octopus’s garden, the documentary from the BBC World Service. I’m Hazel Healy. The producer is Sarah Cuddin. It was a falling tree production. Our planet’s climate is changing. We are in the midst of a climate crisis. The climate question speaks to those hit the hardest. The problems caused by deforestation and the environment are huge. 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