About MarineLens
MarineLens began in Jamestown, Accra, where founder Jeffery Osei Amoafo spent years photographing the fishermen, boats and nets on the landing beach. In 2023 he found out that Nkan, the cassava croaker he grew up eating, is listed as Endangered. The fishermen he told were surprised. The listing existed, but it was written in English on a website none of them had a reason to open.
MarineLens exists to put that information where the fish come in. The catalog covers six species. The original photographs came from the Jamestown and Elmina landing beaches, where fishermen shared names in Fante, Ga, Ewe and Nzema. We pair available local names with each species’ conservation status and how often it is caught.
What you can do with it
Look up a fish by any of its names and see what to do when you catch it: keep it, think about putting it back, or put it back if it is alive. A short animation shows how long the fish has to be before it is fully grown, measured against your own arm. You can also record a catch on your phone: the fish, the gear, the size and where it was landed. Add MarineLens to your home screen and all of this works with no signal.
What we are building next
We are working toward scanning a fish with the phone camera. That needs many more photos from Ghanaian boats before it can work, so for now the catalog is the way to find a fish. After that, we want to build a shared catch record that fishermen and researchers can both use, open only to those who choose to join.
Contact
Have a question, a suggestion, or a story from the landing beach? Write to us.
marinelens@mnjinitiative.org