leopard blenny in coral_Edit I

Orchestra of the Sea: Preserving God’s Creatures in Kenya

by Dr. Robert Sluka


The following excerpt is adapted from Dr. Robert Sluka’s ecological memoir, “Connected by Water,” which describes the integration of his Christian faith with his vocation as a marine scientist over decades of work in the world’s oceans.

Read on for Bob’s reflections on his time researching corals and Halavi Guitarfish with A Rocha Kenya! You can purchase the full book here.


Waking up at the Mwamba Conservation Centre is often easy – the monkeys make it difficult to sleep in. They play on the tin roofs, and at times you must guard your breakfast from a cheeky individual looking for a snack.

Mwamba is the base of operations for A Rocha Kenya, and if you ever stay there, you can go outside and take a 30-second walk down a sand path dumping you onto what is considered one of the most beautiful beaches in East Africa. You can smell the ocean and the tropical flowers.

During my first visit to Mwamba, the National Director for A Rocha Kenya, Dr. Colin Jackson, made a startling request. He spoke with me about a small donation that had just been made for marine conservation work and asked if I could take charge of directing how it was used. I agreed, of course, and have been helping to support the marine work there ever since.

Dr. Sluka and the ARK marine team at the time exploring tide pools in Watamu Park. Photo by Sarah Sluka.

Much of my subsequent projects for A Rocha Kenya focused on the Watamu Marine National Park, which is located just eighty meters away from Mwamba. The park has a relatively small area (10 km2), and its beachfront can be walked in about an hour. Extending out to a coral reef crest, most of Watamu is relatively shallow water and can be snorkeled easily, something that both we and visiting tourists took advantage of.

All the tourist boats went to one particular reef called Coral Gardens, and A Rocha Kenya was trying to learn whether the tourists were damaging this site. Many people want to see coral reefs and all the amazing fish life there. When the boat pulls up to the reef, fish swarm around it – the legacy of feeding the fish. You can swim through clouds of brightly colored scales, and if you search, you can find eels, rays, and other interesting creatures.

Our team found that the reef visited by tourists manifested observable damage and differences in ecological character, which potentially compromised its ecological sustainability. Despite these observations, most tourists did not notice the changes or were happy with their experience, and hence the economic sustainability of the park seemed secure. However, the future trajectory of reef conditions and tourism on the reef is complex and difficult to predict, which could lead to a trade-off between conservation and income-generating goals.

It is easy to love something to death. A famous paper written by Garrett Hardin, called “The Tragedy of the Commons,” spelled this out. Imagine walking through a park and seeing a field of beautiful flowers. No one owns the park, so to speak: it is a commons. Everyone can use it. What does it hurt for you to pick just one flower? The problem is that the thousands of people after you start thinking the same way, and eventually the park has very few flowers.

This is when another famous concept and paper by Daniel Pauly comes into play, who describes the “Shifting Baseline Syndrome.” If you walked through this same park years later with, say, 90% of the flowers gone, you might still think it beautiful. After all, much of the rest of your city is concrete, and here is a place with some flowers. You think this is normal for that park and how it should be – your idea of what a healthy, beautiful park looks like has shifted. Some grumpy old guy might tell you something like, “You should have seen it when I was a kid” – and they would be right, but that guy probably picked some of those flowers.

Can you find the Leopard Blenny in this coral head from Watamu Park? Photo by Dr. Robert Sluka.

We get used to the slow decline in beauty of the natural world. A study on the amount of weight of mammals on the planet (so that an elephant counts more than a mouse) revealed that only 4% of mammal weight globally is actually wildlife! The remaining 96% are humans and our livestock. We have so altered our planet that it would be unrecognizable to our ancestors.

Does it really matter whether or not it is a cow or an elephant in that field? I think it does. One of the theological principles that has captured my imagination is the idea of intrinsic value, or the goodness of creation irrespective of its value to humans. In Genesis 1, God declares His creation good before humans are on the scene. Throughout Scripture, creation praises God independently of humanity, and the book of Colossians tells us that creation was made by, for, and through Christ, and is itself healed through the cross. This was revolutionary to my thinking as a follower of Christ.

One of my first forays into expressing this practically came about because of a report of a dugong sighted in Kenya. These are large marine mammals – sea cows – and the Indo-Pacific relative of manatees. They have been hunted since humans could do so and have been wiped out through most of their range.

A dugong hadn’t been spotted in Kenya in a long time – but what was the big deal? I argued that these animals were one voice in the orchestra of creation praising God, and that protecting them and helping them thrive again was an important part of our Christian faith. If “sea cows” were replaced pound for pound by land cows, it would not be the same. Something in creation would have diminished by the sea cows disappearing and not praising God anymore. Diversity is an important part of how God’s world was made.

I have also celebrated the intrinsic value of biodiversity through my work with the Halavi Guitarfish (Glaucostegus halavi) around Watamu Park, which is considered Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List. This means that it is one step away from Extinct in the Wild.

Halavi Guitarfish. Photo by Benjamin Cowburn.

Why do we care about extinction? After all, throughout the spacetime of Earth many, many species have gone extinct. Yet Scripture seems to indicate that each of these species has a specific role to play ecologically (Psalm 104) and also spiritually as creatures who praise their maker, including within the new creation (Rev. 5:9-14). So, as followers of the Christ who these creatures praise, and whose sacrifice on the cross aims to reconcile all of creation to God (Col. 1:19-20), part of our service to God is to move the world towards this final restoration.

If there will be no extinction in the new creation, then we must move in that direction. That seems all the more clear when we consider that a creature like the Halavi Guitarfish is Critically Endangered not because of natural selection, but because we have killed too many of them.

Kenya is where I really put together my spiritual life with my marine biology training. Much of what I did there was not scientifically new to me, but was important for setting the conservation agenda for the Watamu Marine National Park and A Rocha Kenya’s marine conservation work.

The time and specific location and camaraderie of other Christian scientists also allowed me to think wide and deep about how faith intersects with marine conservation. While England is, in many ways, my spiritual scientific home, Kenya is where I was able to concretely apply and refine these principles.


Dr. Robert D. Sluka is Lead Scientist of A Rocha’s Marine Conservation Programme (www.arocha.org/marine), a role that includes spearheading A Rocha USA’s marine conservation work in Florida. He is a curious explorer, applying hopeful, optimistic, and holistic solutions to all that is ailing our oceans. Bob’s research focuses on marine biodiversity conservation, plastic pollution, and fisheries, particularly marine protected areas. He writes on the interface between Christian faith and marine conservation at https://sluka.substack.com.

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