- For the past 10 years, marine biologist and conservationist Stan Shea has been leading a citizen-science program called the 114°E Hong Kong Reef Fish Survey to compile data on local reef fish species and raise awareness about the marine environment.
- The program relies on a core network of around 50 volunteer divers, who assist Shea with his mission to raise awareness about Hong Kong’s aquatic life.
- There are likely about 500 reef fish species in Hong Kong, but only about 460 have been identified so far; Shea and his team aim to find and document as many of the other overlooked as possible.
- Shea is also working on a photographic book about Hong Kong’s reef fish, which will be published in 2026.
Kamy Yeung said she wanted to do more scuba diving. So in 2014, she signed up to be a volunteer diver for a newly launched reef fish survey project in Hong Kong. The experience changed everything she knew about the underwater world.
“Like many other Hong Kongers, I was under the impression that we don’t get to see [many fish] in the Hong Kong waters,” Yeung, a secondary school teacher, told Mongabay. “I always thought I had to go overseas to see different kinds of fish. But now I know that we actually have lots of biodiversity in the Hong Kong waters.”
The project, a citizen science program known as 114°E Hong Kong Reef Fish Survey and now in its 10th year, is the creation of Stanley Shea, a marine scientist and conservationist who acts as the marine program director for the NGO BLOOM Association Hong Kong. He started the project after recognizing how little had been done to survey reef fish in the island city’s waters, despite the importance of seafood for local consumption and trade.
Yvonne Sadovy, a biologist who taught at the University of Hong Kong for many years and once advised Shea on his master’s project, is very familiar with this issue. “Most students only ever had access to dead [fish] in marketplaces, so they didn’t perceive these animals as wildlife in a sense,” Sadovy told Mongabay about her former students.
Data were also scarce. No one had even done an underwater fish survey in Hong Kong until 1999, despite the fish diversity being comparable “to the entire Caribbean,” Shea told Mongabay.
“We saw the opportunity to understand more,” Shea said.
While a critical goal for Shea is to educate the public about the diversity of fish life below the surface of Hong Kong’s waters, he’s also interested in collecting data to inform decisions around establishing local marine protected areas (MPAs).
Currently, less than 5% of Hong Kong’s waters constitute MPAs. Of this, only about 0.01% is fully protected from activities like fishing and vessel traffic. Scientists and conservation experts are calling for more MPAs to be established for Hong Kong to meet the Convention on Biological Diversity goal of protecting 30% of land and marine areas by 2030.
“People want to know about [the] protection [of Hong Kong waters], but if we don’t know what we have, it’s actually difficult to talk about protection,” Shea said. “So we try to find a baseline by providing fundamental information that people can understand. Maybe there are some hotspots that will have more fishes.”
To tackle these issues, Shea set out to document as many of Hong Kong’s reef fish species as possible, engaging a core network of about 50 volunteer divers to survey the rich marine biodiversity. Shea’s project is built upon the work of Andy Cornish, a conservation expert who completed his Ph.D. thesis on fishes in shallow, fringing coral communities in subtropical Hong Kong, and who subsequently published a book on Hong Kong reef fish along with Sadovy. Both Cornish and Sadovy are now working group members of the 114°E survey team, providing technical advice and often joining the survey dives.
Based on Cornish’s research, Shea said he believes there are about 500 reef fish species in the waters around Hong Kong, but only about 320 were identified in the book by Cornish and Sadovy. With his underwater survey work, Shea has identified over 50 additional species, including several that had never been reported in Hong Kong before, according to papers published in 2016 and 2018. Shea and his team of volunteer divers continue their work today, intending to find every fish species swimming in Hong Kong waters. Through the efforts of Shea and other researchers, about 460 species of reef fish have now been identified in Hong Kong.
Over the past decade, they’ve surveyed more than 40 dive sites around Hong Kong. At times, the volunteers have scrolled social media to find public posts about potentially new fish, then searched an approximate area for the species, Shea said.
“Our volunteers are amazing — they just look at everything,” Shea said. “And then whenever they see something new, something interesting, they will share it with us.”
Yet, as Shea noted, data are only useful if they’re being used. To get information out to the public, Shea largely relies on his network of volunteers, many of whom, like Yeung, are teachers.
Yeung said she regularly takes her knowledge into her classroom, and that her own interest in Hong Kong reef fish has fostered a similar fascination among her students.
“I have been displaying the [underwater] photographs that I took at school, and it actually created a lot of discussions among the students,” she said. “They became more interested in the Hong Kong [marine] environment, and they wanted to know more about it.”
Shea, who has been expanding his reef fish survey work during his tenure as a marine fellow with the Pew Charitable Trusts, will be publishing a new book in 2026 on Hong Kong’s reef fish packed full of photos of the different species. He said he hopes the book will engage with an “even younger generation” and more of the general public.
“Most people in Hong Kong live within a very small number of kilometers from the sea, but they have no idea what’s in the sea, and yet our diversity is fantastic,” Sadovy said. “And my experience has been consistently that when people learn about what’s there, and they see beautiful pictures … they take an interest, and they begin to see them as wildlife. And if you begin to see things in this way, you’re more interested in conservation, and you might be more interested in your seafood choices.”
Sadovy credited Shea with filling in many data gaps about Hong Kong’s reef fish, but said she feels his most significant achievement so far has been raising awareness.
“He’s reaching so many young people, and building a passion for fish, and particularly for just what fantastic things we have in Hong Kong’s marine waters,” she said. “He reaches a lot of people.”
Banner image: An anemone fish in Hong Kong’s coral reefs. Image by Gomen See@114°E Hong Kong Reef Fish Survey.
Elizabeth Claire Alberts is a senior staff writer for Mongabay’s Ocean Desk. Follow her on Mastodon, @[email protected], Blue Sky, @elizabethalberts.bsky.social, and Twitter @ECAlberts.
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Citations:
Brock, V. E. (1954). A preliminary report on a method of estimating reef fish populations. The Journal of Wildlife Management, 18(3), 297-308. doi:10.2307/3797016
Larson, S., Christiansen, J., Olsen, A. Y., Walsh, W. J., Teague, C. H., Tissot, B., & Randell, Z. (2022). A unique 100 meter underwater survey method documents changes in abundance, richness, and community structure of Hawai‘i reef fishes. Frontiers in Marine Science, 9. doi:10.3389/fmars.2022.892261
Cornish, A. S. (2000). Fish assemblages associated with shallow, fringing coral communities in sub-tropical Hong Kong: Species composition, spatial and temporal patterns (Doctoral dissertation, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China). Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/10722/35831
To, A. W., & Shea, S. K. (2016). New records of four reef fish species for Hong Kong. Marine Biodiversity Records, 9(1). doi:10.1186/s41200-016-0083-9
Shea, S. K., & To, A. W. (2018). Ocean fifteen: New records of reef fish species in Hong Kong. Marine Biodiversity Records, 11(1). doi:10.1186/s41200-018-0159-9
