An Interview – Holly Hokenson

This week on ‘An Interview with WiseOceans’ we spoke with our own Holly Hokenson

Name: Holly Hokenson

Role: Marine Biologist and Educator

Company: WiseOceans

Top Tip: Go to where you want to work

1. What inspired you to pursue a career in marine conservation? 

Just a very simple love of the sea that was born with me. My mom says I told her when I was five that I was going to move to Australia and work in the ocean. I hadn’t even seen the ocean at that point.

When I was a teenager I didn’t think I had the brains to be a scientist, so I studied communications for my undergrad. Luckily, I did this degree online while living in Cambodia and working as a snorkel tour guide. This happened to be during the global coral bleaching event of 2017. I watched a healthy, beautiful reef first bleach and then die over about three months. I started to learn why it was happening and decided that I was going to spend my life trying to help. I was working in the Ecuadorian Amazon on a clean water project in 2020 when the pandemic ended the foundation I was working with. The quarantine and lack of movement and opportunity convinced me to start my master’s online, where I learned I was smart enough to be a scientist and that I could help through research and action.

2. What steps did you take or are you currently taking to achieve your career goals?

My career goals are to learn about marine systems that are in danger and communicate those dangers to people in positions of power who can create legal protections. The steps to achieve these goals have been, learning how to research and write papers, learning how to create statistics, learning how to scuba and freedive, learning how to access people in power and talk to them in a way that makes them care. Some of these things I learned in school, others I learned from volunteering, others I learned from travel.

3. How did you obtain your current position? 

I’m a little embarrassed to be honest here because I used Claude, the AI software. I fed it my CV and some of my cover letters and had it find me organizations that my background and skills aligned with. WiseOceans was one of the companies that it found and I applied. I don’t know if I would make the same choice now that I know more about the environmental impacts of AI.

4. Which part of your job do you enjoy the most?  

I love learning about the ocean. It’s been so great to get settled into an area where I can focus on the local system. I feel that there is just so much to know and things change a lot region to region so I’ve really appreciated the chance to focus in on one place and prioritize finding solutions to the biggest threats to this specific environment.

5. Are there aspects of your position which make you feel that you are really ‘making a difference’? 

I am just starting out in this position so I wouldn’t say that yet. But the last ecological survey of any kind done on the local biosphere reserve I am working with, was in 2008. This area is so understudied and underappreciated. The biodiversity here is incredible and important. It is my great hope that my being here can bring about a detailed and complex understanding of this ecosystem that hasn’t yet been achieved.

6. What do you know now that you wish you knew when you were starting out?

I moved countries a lot in my twenties, the longest place I lived was Ecuador and that was two and a half years. I had many months and years of living nomadically with just my backpack. I was told by so many people in my life that traveling was something that should wait until I was older and retired and that doing it while I was young was irresponsible socially and financially. I wish I knew then that my travel history would be the thing that set me apart from other candidates when applying for jobs. I wish that I had known that moving around would give me so many opportunities to volunteer on different projects, understand how to work effectively with international teams, adapt to a new culture with ease, and learn another language. Even the position I currently have, I was told that the fact that I had been to Hoi An and loved it here was a big factor in choosing me.

7. Are there any skills you never thought you would need but did?

Coding, so important and probably the hardest part of grad school for me.

8. What advice would you give to budding marine conservationists?  

Go to where you want to work. I wanted to study manta rays for my master’s research, but I was doing an online degree program from University of Idaho and living in Ecuador. The season in Ecuador is limited, and I didn’t have a working visa, so I decided to move to the big island of Hawaii where I had a working privileges and there is a big residential manta ray population. When I arrived, I started to work in a dive shop as a guide, and I started asking everyone who the manta people were in the community. I found these peoples contacts and asked them for a coffee and told them I wanted to be a part of their efforts. That led to my first position as a research associate. Through this position I became a speaker at World Manta Day for several years in a row and was one of five people in the country on a permit to collect tissue biopsies from manta rays for a genetics project. It is true that so much of getting a job in any industry is who you know, but you can go meet the people you need to know. The people who show up are the ones who get opportunities.

9. What is your favourite marine creature and why?

My favourite animal is a manta ray. I saw one for the first time in 2017 while I was doing my Open Water scuba course in Komodo National Park. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, I cried. It was just my instructor and I and the manta stayed with us for around twenty minutes, just circling our heads and looking into my eyes. I love how smart they are, how playful and curious. They live as long as humans do and I like thinking there is a manta somewhere in the world that was born the same day as I was and we’re just living our lives together and apart.

10. What is your most unforgettable moment in the sea?

Once time I was diving Isla de la Plata in Ecuador; a severely underrated diving destination in my opinion. From June to September oceanic manta rays come here in the dozens. They stay for a couple weeks and then continue their migration. During this period, you can dive their cleaning stations. On one dive I was at one of these cleaning stations and there were about ten mantas there with me. All oceanics so about 7-9 meters across from wingtip to wingtip, some were melanistic. They were all coming in for very close passes, and my favourite thing to do with mantas is get eye contact so I was already having a wonderful time. About halfway through the dive one of the female mantas swam up in front of me so her belly was facing me and showed me a hook lodged in her chest. She put this hook directly in front of my eyes and stayed there. Now, this is wild for a couple reasons. One, she was asking for help from a person. Two, she knew that my eyes are how I see and where they were enough to position this hook directly in front of them. Three, manta rays need to be swimming to get the oxygen from the water that they need to breathe, so by sitting in one place she was holding her breath. I looked at the hook and saw that it was the kind of fishing hook that you need a special tool to take out and I couldn’t remove it without ripping a hole in her skin. So instead of trying to take out the hook I took my secondary air source and I blew bubbles on her belly and started poking the big remoras on her to get them to move. She must’ve liked this because she repositioned herself above me and rubbed into me like a cat being pet. I moved on to the sand so I wouldn’t hurt any coral and continued to blow bubbles on her until I was close to running out of air. She stayed with me the whole dive and as I surface she followed underneath me like a magic carpet. I stayed in the water with my snorkel in until the dive shop I was with made me get out. On the next dive we went around to the other side of the island. Within five minutes of descending the same manta found me again. Presenting her belly and hook in the same way. Manta rays have unique spot patterns on their bellies so you can tell who an individual is by that pattern. I had told my divemaster about the hook so she brought the correct tool and was able to remove it. The manta stayed with us the entire dive. Please enjoy this photo of her pressing me to the sand.