We commit to expand the Urban Bay documentary initiative by investigating the marine biodiversity of Guanabara Bay, its main stressors as well as its environmental, economic and social potentials, as evidenced by the fantastic discoveries that we made during the production of the first documentary.

Despite the multitude and large volume of pollutants and stressors encountered in the Bay, it still ranks as the one with the fourth greatest diversity of elasmobranchs (i.e. rays and sharks) in the world! There are seven different types of rays living in this estuary, without speaking of all the pelagic rays that sometimes visit the area in search of food. But the population of rays is falling, continuously, because of environmental stressors and over-fishing!

Fishermen looking for Sole fishes using bottom trawling, wipe out most of the benthic life, negatively affecting fish stocks. Bottom trawling also stirs up bottom sediments, thus mixing persistent organic pollutants that are trapped in those first with the plankton and then, further down the food chain, with the seafood that we consume. Rays, in particular, are great predators and they sit at the top of the marine food chain, so they bio-accumulate several types of harmful substances in their tissues. In Brazil, the bycatch of ray is frequent and most of those rays still find their way to the market, often sold as 'juvenile sharks', despite existing laws and regulations. In 2014, the Brazilian Environmental Ministry indeed released a list of more than 400 fish species, forbidding its catch or commerce, and four of the seven species of rays present in Guanabara are part of that list!
Rays have been evolving for more than 400 million years, and still, they are vulnerable by having specialized reproduction, internal fertilization and because they only produce a small number of pups. So, each ray that dies unnaturally affects the control of the population of its preys, unbalancing the food webs.

The Guanabara's waters are home to those beautiful animals that could generate thousands of jobs if instead of killing them for carcinogenic food, they were exploited for underwater ecotourism.

It is time to become aware of the impact of our personal and collective actions. Let's change our behavior before it's too late!

This campaign aims at re-evaluating the coastal and oceanic ecosystem services provided by the Guanabara Bay through the production a Web Documentary about the rays, screenings of the documentary around the State of Rio de Janeiro and the installation of a statue of a ray in a public square!

Our mission is to combat ignorance about the ocean and its stressors through the display of the reasons for preserving marine ecosystems, such as the beauty of its biodiversity and the importance of the irreplaceable services provided by the sea, always based on scientific evidence and using a language comprehensible by the general public.