Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries.
Mohammed Abu Daya is a marine ecologist from Gaza. His work focuses on spinetail devil rays, also known as giant devil rays, a critically endangered species that moves through the Mediterranean and beyond. Few scientists specialize in these animals. Fewer still have studied them from Gaza, where local waters form part of their range.
Before the war, Abu Daya taught at Palestinian universities and worked from Gaza’s National Research Center. He went to sea with fishers, measured spinetail devil rays (Mobula mobular) brought ashore, monitored markets, and gathered data on a species more often studied from the western Mediterranean. His work helped place Gaza within the known range of the threatened migratory animal, reports contributor Lyse Mauvais for Mongabay.
The pressures on Gaza’s sea were already severe. Israeli restrictions limited where fishers could work. Fish stocks had declined. Poverty and fuel costs pushed people toward whatever could be caught close to shore. In 2013, when a large group of devil rays came near Gaza’s coast, fishers landed several hundred of them. Abu Daya did not treat the event only as a conservation failure. He tried to understand what had led to it, including the lack of local conservation systems and the strain on people living with few choices.
Then came the current war. Abu Daya lost his home, his office, and regular access to the sea. Universities, libraries, fishing boats, landing sites, and port infrastructure have been destroyed. He has been displaced several times and now lives, like many in Gaza, with limited access to food, clean water, electricity, and the internet.
He has continued to work.
In 2025, during the war, Abu Daya co-authored a study on spinetail devil ray movement across the Mediterranean. One ray he had personally tagged off Gaza with the help of local fishermen traveled to Spain and later returned to the Levantine Sea. The finding helped show that these animals make long, repeated migrations, and that eastern Mediterranean waters are important to their survival.
His persistence is difficult to absorb. A scientist cut off from his laboratory, his students, and the sea keeps analyzing data from a tent. He joins conferences remotely when he can. He collaborates with colleagues abroad. He works on manuscripts while daily life is reduced to securing water and food.
The war has also damaged the conditions that make science possible. It has destroyed institutions, field sites, records, equipment, and classrooms. It has interrupted the lives of people whose knowledge may never be rebuilt in the same form. Conservation depends on those people: the local scientists who know the coast, the fishers who remember what came ashore, and the students who might have carried the work forward.
Read the full interview with Mohammed Abu Daya here.
Banner image: Mohammed Abu Daya, right, collects data on a spinetail devil ray in Gaza in 2015. Image courtesy of Mohammed Abu Daya and Giuseppe Notarbartolo di Sciara.
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