Ben Harris

So in certain areas, it might be that they recover really, really quickly and you leave it for a couple of years and suddenly your fish stocks come back and

you see this big sort of boom in biodiversity.

It might be that in other areas, it's much, much slower.

And I think that's going to be the case for a lot of these soft sediment environments, especially around the UK where they're a bit deeper and a bit darker.

The kind of metabolic rate of that environment is quite slow.

But given enough time, they will recover.

That's certainly true.

We know marine protected areas work.

We know from multiple contexts, multiple places around the world, that they work, yes.

And some might take longer than others.

I got in the water in the very early morning before the sun had risen, and the water was pitch black.

I started swimming, and I felt the water hollowing out around me and felt like something really big was swimming below.

You're listening to Today Explained.