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No Fishing License: Protecting the Environment by Doing Nothing

Caitlyn Carden

University of California, Santa Barbara

Writing 2

Valentina Fahler

February 27, 2022

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I’ve been listening to other people explain things to me for as long as I can remember.

My role in the instructor-student relationship has always been clear; listen carefully, take notes,

do my best to understand. I had never stopped to think about the work that went into the

instruction. I was so focused on my own understanding, I didn’t even consider that the instructor

not only had to understand the material, but also understand how to deliver that information to

others. Translating a research article about a complex topic, such as marine ecology, into only

one page of easily digestible information showed me the challenges of ensuring the

understanding of a less experienced audience.

When I went searching for an article from my discipline, ecology, I thought about the

courses I had been taking that covered the impact of humans on coral reefs. I wanted to find an

article on this topic that I could use to appeal to a more general audience, while staying within

the bounds of my discipline. To do this, I took the advice of Karen Rosenberg and looked for the

most important parts of these articles, the titles and abstracts. According to Rosenberg, the

abstract includes “the main problem or question…, the approach the shiny new thing that this

article does… and why people who are already invested in this field should care.” After scanning

titles and reading various abstracts, I settled on Mellin et al’s “Marine protected areas increase

resilience among coral reef communities.”

I wanted my new genre to reflect an interest in the health of coral reef communities,

while being more accessible and easier to digest than a research article. There are many different

things that can accomplish this – documentaries, cartoons, blog posts – and all have been utilized

successfully before. But I wanted my genre to reflect the main argument of the paper, that marine

protected areas increase resilience by limiting the amount of human activity such as fishing that
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can take place on or near a reef. This led me to think more about genres connected to fishing,

such as a fishing license. Fishing licenses, however, are usually sold to people with the purpose

of allowing them to fish, and my goal was to discourage that. What’s something I could use that

succinctly conveyed that discouragement while also kind of making a pun at the same time? A

no-fishing license.

As I mentioned before, fishing licenses are sold to people, usually by local bodies of

government, as a way to authorize the act of fishing. Thus, I felt I needed to include a similar

authority as these government bodies, but I didn’t want to just make one up. Since my research

article was about how marine protected areas affect coral reefs, I looked more into the marine

protection of the Great Barrier Reef, where the authors conducted their research. The Great

Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority acts much like the U.S. National Park Service, managing

and enforcing the protection of certain areas by limiting their use by humans. I felt this would

make my translation look that much more credible as a method of encouraging people to limit

their own activity on coral reefs.

Unfortunately for me, fishing licenses generally don’t include much information beyond

the license holder’s name, address, and other identifying information. Yes, I could fudge it to

include the information relevant to my topic, but licenses aren’t very big, and it would be

difficult to fit all I needed to into such a small space. At this point I turned to our class materials

for help in figuring out my next step. In her text “Genre in the Wild”, Lisa Bickmore (2016)

says, “It’s perhaps helpful [...] to think about how the genre at hand might fit into larger genre

sets and systems.” So, I thought about the process of getting a fishing license. Fill out the

application, pay the fee, and receive your license in the mail. Government-issued IDs and
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important documents are often accompanied by a letter stating the benefits for and

responsibilities of the recipient. This was somewhere I could go into more detail about coral reef

resilience while staying within the bounds of my chosen genre. Then I could include minimal

information on the license itself, rather than getting too wordy and taking up space.

The next challenge was actually reading my research article and deciding which

information I should include in my translation. Rosenberg (2011) recommends paying attention

to section headers to find the necessary information. Using this strategy, I was able to disregard

the methods completely, I don’t think my audience cares much about how this research was

conducted. Then, I went back to the introduction. Since introductions to research articles are

generally used to provide background in the form of previous relevant research, I didn’t really

need to include it either. After this, I could focus on the results and discussion when finding

relevant information for my translation

Dana Driscoll, in her Introduction to Primary Research (2011), writes, “In formal

research papers, the discussion section presents your own interpretation of your results.” This

interpretation was, for me, the most important part of the research article. Driscoll (2011)

continues after this quote to say that the discussion is where the call to action is made as well,

which is what I wanted to focus on when translating this. For this specific article, they

interpreted that coral reef communities within marine protected areas are more resistant to

disturbances and recover more quickly after a disturbance. This was supported by results

showing a relative increase in biodiversity and coral cover in the years following an ecological

disturbance. Thus, their call to action is to set up more marine protected areas not only in the

Great Barrier Reef, but other places that are subject to disturbance as well. While I made my call
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to action more individual-specific, I kept these interpretations in the forefront of my mind when

writing my translations.

Once I had figured out what information to include, translating and condensing it was my

next step. What proved difficult about this was figuring out how to put this information into

more generic language for a broader audience. Research articles are written for other researchers,

and as such use very specific jargon. For example, the article used “recruitment success” to

determine the recovery of fish communities, but that may not be familiar to my audience, and I

worried about it being interpreted incorrectly. Instead of attempting to directly translate such

specific ecological terms and phrases, I decided to be broader with my statements in my

translation. Not only did this make it easier to read and understand, it helped me save space as

well. To do this, however, I had to assume that my audience doesn’t need or want to know about

the specific mechanics behind reef resilience and recovery. For the concepts I couldn’t omit due

to their emphasis in the research paper, I used context and short definitions to guide my audience

to the right interpretation. For example, the word “biodiversity” might not mean anything to

someone inexperienced with ecology, so I added context by saying “many different species” later

in the same sentence.

The final challenge for me was putting all of this work together. To quote Lisa Bickmore

again, from her text The Information Effect (2016), “The information must, in other words, add

up in some way: it must lead to and arrive at a point. It must, in other words, tell a story, and the

story must make sense out of the information, or risk being understood as irrelevant.” I tried to

keep this in mind with my translation. I didn’t want to include so little information that the

purpose of my article was lost and my translation had no real basis. I also didn’t want to include

so much that the reader didn’t understand the point I was trying to make and got lost along the
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way. One key thing I did to make my translation more concise while including all the necessary

information was using bullet points. This allowed me to place several smaller ideas under one

big idea without having to include long paragraphs and risk repeating myself. Limiting myself to

one page also forced me to really think about what information I needed to include. After all that,

was easier for me to connect information, and hopefully for my audience to read and

comprehend without being overwhelmed.

Overall, I think I learned a lot about the effort it takes to be able to take a heavy piece of

jargon-laden text and translate it into one simple page and an ID sized card of information. Not

only does it require understanding of specific concepts, biodiversity for example, it requires

understanding of how to present these concepts to an audience with limited base knowledge.

Deciding what to explain further and what to omit entirely takes a lot of forethought and

prediction. I’ve gained a new appreciation for the time and care my instructors have put into

educating myself and others, and I’m hoping I can apply these skills to the rest of my academic

career and beyond, because I think it's important to be able to explain complex ecological and

scientific processes to someone with limited knowledge or experience.

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Reference List

Bickmore, L. “Genre in the Wild.” Open English @ SLCC, SLCC English

Department, 2016.

Bickmore, L. “The Information Effect.” Open English @ SLCC, SLCC English

Department, 2016.

Driscoll, D.L. “Introduction to Primary Research: Observations, Surveys, and

Interviews.” Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, vol. 2, Edited by Charles Lowe and

Pavel Zemliansky, Parlor Press, 2011, pp. 153-174.

Mellin, C., Aaron MacNeil, M., Cheal, A. J., Emslie, M. J., & Julian Caley, M. (2016). Marine

protected areas increase resilience among coral reef communities. Ecology Letters, 19(6),

629–637. https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.12598

Rosenberg, K. “Reading Games: Strategies for Reading Scholarly Sources.” Writing Spaces:

Readings on Writing, vol. 2, Edited by Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky, Parlor Press,

2011, pp. 210-220.

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Dear Resident,

Thank you for applying for your No-Fishing license! Benefits include:

 Understanding of the unique biodiversity of coral reefs, which are home to many
different marine species
 Understanding the negative impact that fishing can have on the stability of these reefs
 Understanding that reefs with higher stability can recover better from disturbances such
as:
o Outbreaks of the coral-eating Crown of Thorns Sea Star
o Extreme storms that cause damage to corals
o Coral bleaching
o Coral diseases

With your promise to not fish in Marine Protected Areas, you will be helping us:

 Prevent loss of hard corals, which in turn prevents the growth of harmful algae
o This reduces the overall abundance of coral in reefs, an effect that can harm
other species and may be difficult to reverse!
 Protect communities that rely on coral for shelter and food, such as:
o Herbivorous fish that slow the growth of harmful algae
o Important invertebrates that feed on and prevent outbreaks of the Crown of
Thorns Sea Star
 Help other non-protected communities recover from disturbances by providing an area
of refuge

We ask that you spread the word that human activity can be detrimental when reefs are not
treated with respect and care and the attached license should help you do just that.

If you’d like to know more, read “Marine protected areas increase resilience among coral reef
communities” by researcher Camille Mellin (et al).
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