I grew up in Nova Scotia spending my summers on the Bras D'or Lake. Some of my earliest memories involve swimming with my cousins, diving for sea stars and crabs, snorkeling and watching the fish and jellyfish all around me. I remember it teeming with life and being full of biodiversity. As the years passed, gradually the biodiversity began to decrease. Sea stars became rarer and rarer, the shoreline became a monoculture of mussels. The change in the ecosystem I loved so dearly inspired me to pursue education in marine biology and then eventually fall into careers in conservation. I would love to some day bring back the biodiversity of my memories, and help to protect other ecosystems from suffering the same fate.